TARGETS ON OUR BACKS?

I will be the first to admit that this entry is more than a little disjointed. There are ideas perking I'm just not sure how to express them.

"There is one winner, only winner, in war. The winner war itself. Not truth, not justice, not liberty, not morality. These are the vanquished. War wins. reducing them to complete submission. He makes the truth serve violence and falsehood. He causes justice to declare not what is just but what is expedient as well as cruel. He reduces the liberty of the victorious side to a servitude equal to that of the tyranny which they attacked, in defense of liberty. Though morality may intend and endeavor to lay down rules for war, in the end war lays down rules for them. He does not find it hard to make them change their minds. If he could he would change God's own mind War has power to transmute evil into good and good into evil. Do not fear that he will not exercise this power. Now more than ever he is omnipotent. He is the great force, the evil mystery, the demonic mover of our century with his globe of sunfire and his pillar of cloud. Worship him."

Thomas Merton's intro to his essay "Target Equals City" in The Nonviolent Alternative.

Merton was writing in the mid sixties. His targets were the rise of bigger and better nuclear weapons and the widening wars in Southeast Asia. He was looking back at condemnation of the Nazi air raids on cities like Warsaw, Rotterdam and London. And how quickly condemnation became Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo. The fire bombing of Tokyo produced more casualties than Hiroshima, it just took more bombs and more planes.

Merton died before the era of "we had to destroy the village to save it. He didn't live to see the civil wars in Central America explode into near genocide. Once you decide the targets are not human it really doesn't matter if you kill one, say a priest or an archbishop.

You can target a few, say some missionary nuns coming back from a conference with names like Ita and Dorothy. They were not only beaten, raped and killed in December of 1980, but the US government practically tied itself in knots to avoid blaming troops in El Salvador for the crimes. They weren't really missionaries claimed our ambassador to the UN. Ms. Sanders isn't the first spokes person to lie with a semi straight face. Their van crashed trying to escape from pursuing members of the Salvadoran military. The condition of their bodies showed that to be a lie.

Once you decide that where people live are targets you start hearing about collateral damage. Or they were supplying or supporting rebel forces or partisans. It doesn't matter if it is a city or a village, if it's one bomb, a hundred or mortar fire. The people living in those apartments, houses, huts or lean to's end up either just as dead or as refugees. And the refugees discover that they are still targets as women, children, the sick and the elderly try to get out of the killing zones.