REFLECTION 11 AUGUST 2024 

PEACE AT WHAT COST AND FOR WHOM? 

By Rev Dr Fei Taule’ale’ausumai 

Peace at what cost and for whom?  Can two sides fighting both be victorious?  Or once one side annihilates the other then that victorious side will the claim to be at peace?  Peace at what cost?  When a world is at war and the threat of a much bigger war is looming, it is hard to write about Peace. 

But let me start here there cannot be peace without justice.  I watched a film called “Breaking” on Wednesday night based on the true-life story of a young marine who had recently had his disability check increased from 10% disability to 50% disability.  The day he walked into to the office to pick up his check the woman at the desk said “you had an outstanding bill from your college days, and we have paid it, so you have no money this month” the check he was expecting was for $890.65 cents.  She then handed him a homelessness brochure for him to see what agencies were available to seek food and accommodation.  Instead, he went to the Wells Fargo bank not to hold it up for money but to get the media and police etc. to surround the bank so he could talk to a negotiator to get his $890 back.  He didn’t want the bank money he just wanted justice.  As far as he was concerned there was no outstanding college debt, and they had no right to pay that without first consulting with him.  The story goes on.  His point was justice, he would not be at peace unless there was justice.  This was something he had to do even if it cost him his life, which it did.   

Peace at what cost and for whom?  The world as it is today in the middle East Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Papua New Guinea to name a few does not look likely to have a ceasefire and create a Peace that is merely just the absence of war.  I have dear friends in American Samoa whose daughters are on scholarships in USA and are also training at military schools.  One has graduated and is now a qualified pilot flying the big Blackhawk helicopters.  I’m scared to think that these young innocent girls will be called up to go and fight in the war in the Middle East.  America Samoa had the highest deaths per capita from the Desert Storm war in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Samoan families see the US military as a ticket to further education and professional jobs in the USA.  But at what cost and for whom? 

If there was one man who made a complete turn from working for the aggressor to becoming a pacifist was Robert Oppenheimer.  He created the atomic bomb and was known as the father of the atomic bomb.
According to a 1949 magazine profile, while witnessing the explosion Oppenheimer thought of verses from the Bhagavad Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one … Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In 1965 he recalled the moment this way:

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
 

Despite many scientists’ opposition to using the bomb on Japan, Compton, Fermi, and Oppenheimer believed that a test explosion would not convince Japan to surrender.  At an August 6 assembly at Los Alamos, the evening of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Oppenheimer took to the stage and clasped his hands together “like a prize-winning boxer” while the crowd cheered. He expressed regret that the weapon was ready too late for use against Nazi Germany.

On August 17, however, Oppenheimer travelled to Washington to hand-deliver a letter to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson expressing his revulsion and his wish to see nuclear weapons banned. In October he met with President Harry S. Truman, who dismissed Oppenheimer’s concern about an arms race with the Soviet Union and belief that atomic energy should be under international control. Truman became infuriated when Oppenheimer said, “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands”, responding that he (Truman) bore sole responsibility for the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan, and later said, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”

Hiroshima was bombed on the morning of August 6, 1945. The city, flat and surrounded by hills, was in many ways an ideal target for the atomic bomb, at least from the perspective of its creators. Their goal was destruction and spectacle, to show the Japanese, the Soviets, and the whole world, what the potential of this new weapon was. The geography of Hiroshima meant that a bomb with the explosive yield of “Little Boy” (the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT), detonated at the ideal altitude, could destroy nearly the entirety of the city.

Neither those in the airplanes that observed the attack nor those on the ground experiencing it could get more than a qualitative sense of the destruction in the immediate aftermath; the smoke, fires, and carnage were too great. Observation aircraft tried in vain to photograph the damage later in the day, but the city was too obscured by smoke to accurately assess. On the ground, eyewitnesses were largely unaware that it had been a single attack, and a consistency across accounts is their shock at realizing that the entire city had been affected at once by a single plane.  I may have mentioned this before, but my dear friend and World-renowned Theologian Kosuke Koyama was from Hiroshima, and he recalls as a young boy having to sift amongst the rubble and debris for something to eat.  Do you ever get over it?  Diseases and cancers of all kinds continue to manifest among the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their children and their grandchildren today.  

Over in the Middle East, it does not matter which side you are on the statistics are harrowing for the Palestinians in Gaza.  Palestinian people killed: 38,345 | People injured: 88,295 with many more missing or buried under the rubble | Population in Gaza: 2.1 million | Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs): ~1.9 million.16251 Palestinian children killed as at this week 16251. 

Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.  My favorite theologian Bill loader has this to say:  Jesus is saying: the important thing is not just not to murder, but not to hate. Hate leads to violence. It is no more a condemnation of the feeling of anger, which often comes with hurt and pain. Gospel writers had no hesitation in speaking of Jesus becoming angry. It is what you do with your anger that counts. Anger turned to hate abuses people, often starting with words of abuse. Jesus is saying: if you take the command, “Do not kill”, seriously, then you will not embrace hate and let your anger turn to abuse of others. Jesus teaches love your enemies the foundation is God’s love and openness to all. 

When we believe God’s goodness and generosity towards us, then we will not write ourselves off and we will not write others off. This runs counter to some very strong values embedded in human society.  Bill loader adds perhaps laid down for males through our evolution in times when survival required fight. These days we entertain ourselves and our children so often with fantasies about how to kill people, whether literally or in hatefulness. There is a certain attraction in being able to divide people into those we love and those we hate – and those we don’t know so don’t care about anyway. It seeds racism. It rescues us from complexity and the messiness of needing to think, and to engage the unfamiliar and less amenable to us and our ways.  

The religious form of this is to deem some people as never having been chosen, never having been of worth, not counting. Religions use it to rationalise rejection. It is, alas, alive and well. It is easier to eliminate people in this way than to take up the challenge of respecting them, engaging them, seeking a right relationship with them – God’s way according to the gospel, though “God” is often made to model, motivate and rationalise our fondness for hate. 

Matthew’s Jesus instructs people to put an effort into sorting out problems of wrongdoing in the community (18:15-18) and approaching them with compassion and prayer (18:12-14, 19-20, 21-35). We still need that wisdom: don’t go gossiping! Don’t just sit on it (it might explode destructively one day, or you might implode with stress). Deal with it. When Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers” (5:9), it is clear from Matthew’s gospel, that he did not mean, blessed are those who sweep things under the carpet, or those who lie to themselves and others about pain. If it hurts, say so. Deal with it! Help others deal with pain and conflict. Be a life-bearer, not a death-bearer – for others’ sake and also your own – not to speak of, for the sake of the church, the community, and also the marriage and family. Matthew seems to have had an astute understanding of what it meant to be church: it includes dealing with anger and conflict. . 

This was the mantra of Kel Garda’s life during the war  

Where peace is lost, may we find it.
Where peace is broken, may we mend it.
Where we go, may peace follow.
Where we fall, may peace rise. 

Amen. 

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