“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘get by.’   The ordinary men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies.

Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, love small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you.

But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”

Sophie Scholl

REMEMBERING SOPHIE SCHOLL

A favourite narrative among Americans is that such warfare is surgical and precise and does little “collateral damage”. Collateral damage is the standard euphemism for “killing and maiming innocent men, women and children”. But according to a recent study this “surgical” narrative is false. Researchers at the Stanford Law School and New York University’s School of Law estimated that from June 2004 to mid-September 2012 drone attacks in Pakistan killed 2,593 to 3,365 people; 474 to 884 were civilians, including at least 176 children, and 1,249 to 1,389 people were injured. The remote control murder of innocent husbands, fathers, wives and children has angered Pakistanis and others in that region of the world and helped to radicalise them against the US, helping to create a fertile field for terrorists to recruit new converts.

Many people respond to this by saying: “Oh, but all that sort of thing changed after 2009, when that dangerous cowboy Bush was voted out and Barack Obama rang in a new era of hope and change.” Not so much as you might think. In fact, most Americans – like most Britons and, indeed, most people outside Pakistan – are unaware of the realities of how the Obama administration conducts this war. Here are some salient things to remember.

Describing the CIA’s drone strikes, the American investigative journalist Jane Mayer notes: “The programme is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.”

America’s drone wars are not creating a safer world (Catholic Herald)

“My view is absolutely clear: torture is wrong and shouldn’t be allowed, and people who torture should be apprehended, with the full force of law applied.” 

Speaking from his residence in London on July 20, Britain’s most senior ranking general, Field Marshal the Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, believes any use of torture is “very damaging” and does “more harm than good.” 

He also believes people “tend to tell you what you want to hear when being tortured” and it can seriously damage the reputation of countries such as the United States who pride themselves on upholding human rights.

The subject of torture was just one of several topics addressed by the 73-year-old veteran soldier who is a convert to Catholicism and a member of the Knights of Malta.

A Soldier’s View of Torture, Just War Principles

Before praying the Angelus at midday today, Benedict XVI dedicated some remarks to what he described as “a fundamental and ever enthralling theme of the Bible”: the fact that “God is the Pastor of humankind”.

Addressing faithful gathered in the inner courtyard of the Apostolic Palace of Castelgandolfo, the Pope explained how this phrase means that “God wants life for us, He wants to guide us to good pastures where we can find nourishment and rest. He does not want us to lose our way and die, but to reach the goal of our journey, which is fullness of life. This is what any mother or father wants for their children: goodness, happiness, fulfilment. In the Gospel Jesus presents Himself as the Pastor of the lost sheep of the House of Israel. His gaze over His people is a ‘pastoral’ gaze”.

“Among the ‘lost sheep’ whom Jesus saved there was a woman by the name Mary from the village of Magdala on the Sea of Galilee, for which reason she is known as Mary Magdalene. Her feast day falls today. Luke the Evangelist tells us that Jesus freed her from seven demons; in other words, He saved her from utter servitude to the Evil One. And ,in what does this profound healing that God achieves through Jesus consist? It consists in true and complete peace, which is the result of the reconciliation of people in themselves and in all their relations: with God, with others and with the world.

“In fact”, the Pope added, “the Evil One always seeks to destroy the work of God by sowing strife in the human heart, between body and soul, between man and God, in interpersonal, social and international relations, even between man and the creation. The Evil One spreads war; God creates peace”.

Louis Nemeth/U.S. Army Signal Corps

From “The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge”

In much of Europe, the collapse of the world economy after 1929 was exacerbated by the social and ethnic divisions of the successor states, their boundary grievances, and the real or imagined fear of communist revolution. Most of Europe outside the monarchies of the north and west turned to right-wing authoritarian regimes which, though often called “fascist,” made little pretense of being ideologically based; they resembled Italy less than they did Latin America.

Germany presented a very different and very grievous case; there, the 1933 elevation of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) to the office of chancellor proved that thuggery, the repellent doctrines of National Socialism (including virulent anti- Semitism), and German nationalistic resentment over the post–World War I settlement were sufficient to establish the Nazi dictatorship in the heart of Europe.

The Western democracies dithered, deluded themselves, and sought peace through appeasement. Having neglected their own military capabilities while Hitler was rebuilding the German war machine, there were few realistic alternatives to appeasement, in any case.

Domestically, the German persecution of Jews accelerated throughout the 1930’s, while Hitler, bent on overturning the Versailles settlement, successfully remilitarized the Rhineland (1936) and absorbed Austria (in a sudden campaign called the Anschluss) and the ethnically German parts of Czechoslovakia (1938), then turned the remainder of Czechoslovakia into a satellite, took the city of Memel from Lithuania, and began demands on Poland (1939).

In August 1939, Germany and Russia agreed to partition Poland yet again. With Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September, World War II began in Europe. (The Asian phase of World War II had begun two years earlier.) The European war was, until 1941, an unbroken series of totalitarian triumphs; by June of 1940, when France fell, all of Europe outside Britain was neutral or an ally or satellite of Germany.

But in June of 1941, Hitler invaded Russia, and in December, Hitler’s ally, Japan, attacked the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

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The attack was designed to cripple the American Pacific fleet, thus giving the Japanese a free hand for the invasion of southeast Asia, which brought Japanese forces by mid-1942 to occupy the American Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, British Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma, while French Indochina and independent Thailand collaborated. But the American carrier fleet survived the attack on Pearl Harbor; having failed to defeat the United States in a single blow, the Japanese war effort gradually was ground down by American industrial and military might.

In Europe, German armies penetrated as far east as Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad before being fought to a stalemate on the Eastern Front. The grand alliance of Britain and the U.S. with the USSR forced Nazi Germany to fight a two-front war, which ultimately spelled utter defeat in May of 1945 — but not before Germany killed 6 million Jews and a like number of Gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped people, Communists, and other “undesirables” during the Holocaust.

In Asia, the great powers, especially America, kept up the illusion that China was a great power with Chiang as its ruler, which helped to keep Japanese troops tied down on the Asian mainland. In August 1945, atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, major Japanese cities, hastened Japan’s surrender, and World War II came to its end. The United States and the Soviet Union, with Great Britain a very junior partner, bestrode the globe. Japan itself was occupied by American forces.

In China, civil war led to the establishment of a Communist state within four years of the end of the war, while Eastern Europe came under the domination of the Soviet Union.

A new era in world history had begun.

1939

On September 1, Germany invaded Poland from the west. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3. The United States had declared its neutrality on May 1, 1937, when Roosevelt signed the Permanent Neutrality Bill into law, and on September 5, he invoked that law. On September 8, however, President Roosevelt authorized a military buildup.

The Soviets invaded Poland from the east on September 17. Warsaw surrendered on September 27, and the Germans and Soviets partitioned Poland on September 29. The Soviets then invaded Finland on November 30. In mid-December, the Royal Navy battled the German warship Graf Spee off the South American (Montevideo) coast. The ship’s captain scuttled the Graf Spee on December 17, giving the British a morale boost.

1940

With little action on the main front, the Germans occupied Denmark, and invaded Norway on April 9. The so-called “phonywar” in Europe came to an end on May 10 with a massive German invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) resigned and was replaced by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.

On May 13, Churchill told Britain and the world that he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” German troops crossed into France that same day. On May 26, with the battle in France lost, the British began evacuating their expeditionary force from the port of Dunkirk.

Norway surrendered on June 9; France, on June 22. With Hitler triumphant in Europe, Roosevelt declared a national emergency in the United States on June 27. In preparation for a planned invasion of Britain, the German air force (Luftwaffe) attacked Royal Air Force bases on August 15. The onslaught was massive, but the R.A.F. prevailed. Not long after this pivotal battle, the Germans changed their strategy and began bombing cities. The R.A.F. bombed Berlin on August 25 and 26.

On September 16, President Roosevelt signed the Selective Service Bill, authorizing the draft of Americans between the ages of 21 and 35. With a cross-channel invasion scheduled for September 21, the Germans launched their largest air raid on Britain on September 15, hoping to destroy the R.A.F. The effort failed, and the invasion was postponed. The Luftwaffe continued to bomb England, leading to a massive raid on Coventry on November 14.

1941

British forces in Libya routed the Italians, capturing Tobruk on January 22. The Australians and British followed up with a victory in Benghazi on February 6. On that day, Erwin Rommel (1891–1944) was given command of Germany’s Afrika Korps, which was sent to Libya to assist the beleaguered Italians.

On March 11, the U.S. Senate passed the Lend-Lease Act, which authorized Roosevelt to send arms and equipment to Britain and other countries opposing the Axis (50 destroyers had already been exchanged in September 1940).

On April 6, German troops invaded Yugoslavia and Greece. Rudolf Hess, the third most-powerful man in Nazi Germany, parachuted into Britain on May 10 on a bizarre, unauthorized mission to broker peace between Germany and the British. The Royal Navy sank the German battleship Bismarck on May 27.

In a move that stunned a world already familiar with the unthinkable, Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22. Hitler’s huge commitment of men and material to the Eastern Front meant that Britain was safe from invasion. It also changed the war’s dynamics.

On July 31, the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, used the phrase “final solution” in discussing what was to be done with Europe’s Jews.

Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt met face to face in Newfoundland on August 9-12 to create an eight point program of war aims, subsequently named the Atlantic Charter. After Nazi U-boats attacked numerous American ships, Roosevelt issued the order on September 11 to “shoot at sight” any German or Italian ship encountered by American ships or planes.

Germany ordered Jews to wear a Star of David beginning September 13. The following day, more than a half million Russians surrendered near Kiev. In Asia, Japan’s War Minister, Hideki Tojo (1884–1948), was named Prime Minister on October 16, signaling a more aggressive policy toward the United States.

On December 6, the new Soviet commander of Moscow, General Georgi Zhukov (1896–1974), launched a massive counter-attack against German forces.

On December 7, Japanese warplanes attacked the U.S. naval base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The United States declared war on Japan the following day. Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. on December 11.

1942

The German SS, the elite military units of the Nazis, officially adopted a policy of genocide against the Jews on January 20.

The Japanese captured the British garrison of Singapore, thought to be impregnable, on February 15. On March 11, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur left the Philippines, soon to fall to the Japanese. He told the Filipinos: “I shall return.” The Japanese overran an American garrison on Bataan on April 9.

Nearly 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners were captured, and many died during the Bataan Death March. American morale improved on April 18 when General James Doolittle, flying from the carrier USS Hornet, led an air raid on Tokyo. Less than a month later, from May 4–8, U.S. carriers and planes clashed with Japanese forces in the Battle of the Coral Sea. On May 6 American ground forces on Corregidor surrendered.

More than a thousand British aircraft bombed the German city of Cologne during the night of May 30. Thanks to intercepts of Japanese communications, the American fleet won the Battle of Midway on June 4–6. Japan lost four carriers, and America would now go on the offensive in the Pacific. In North Africa, Rommel overran the British garrison of Tobruk in Libya on June 21.

America’s 1st Marine Division invaded Guadalcanal on August 7. British forces under the command of General Bernard Montgomery (1887–1976) launched the battle of El Alamein on October 24, beginning the Allied reconquest of North Africa. American and British troops invaded Algeria and Morocco on November 8. Code-named Operation Torch, it was the beginning of major Anglo-American operations against the Germans.

In Russia, the Red Army began a major offensive to relieve Stalingrad on November 19.

1943

The Battle of Stalingrad ended with a stunning German surrender on January 31, a turning point of the war in Europe. In the Pacific theater, the Japanese evacuated Guadalcanal on February 9. And in North Africa, the leader of Germany’s famed Afrika Korps, Rommel, left the region on March 9 after a string of defeats.

Polish Jews in Warsaw launched an uprising on April 19. It would end on May 16,with few survivors.

The Anglo-American conquest of North Africa was completed on May 12 with the surrender of remaining Axis troops. The victorious Allies then invaded Sicily on July 10. Fifteen days later, on July 25, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) was overthrown and placed under arrest.

Italy ended hostilities with the Allies on September 3, and the American army invaded Salerno on September 9 to fight German forces in Italy. German troops rescued Mussolini from his captors on September 12. The Soviets continued their dramatic westward push, recapturing Kiev on November 6.

U.S. Marines landed on Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands on November 20. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met together for the first time in Tehran, Iran, from November 28 to December 1. The leaders discussed preparations for an invasion of Nazi-held France. Rommel was named to oversee German defenses in France on December 12. Dwight Eisenhower was appointed supreme commander of the Mediterranean unified command on December 24.

1944

Allied troops landed in Anzio on January 22. The Red Army relieved Leningrad on January 27 after a 900-day siege. A million or more civilians most likely died.

American troops entered Rome on June 4 after weeks of bitter fighting. On June 6, American, British and Canadian troops landed in Normandy as part of the long expected invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe. Five thousand ships, the largest armada in history, took part in the D-Day invasion, Operation Overlord. Some 150,000 troops were put ashore on five beaches.

U.S. Marines, moving closer to the Japanese home islands, invaded Saipan on June 15. American naval forces sank two Japanese carriers during the Battle of the Philippine Sea on June 19–20. Tojo was ousted as the civilian and military leader of Japan in July.

With the Allies pressing on both the western and eastern fronts, a group of dissident German officers attempted to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20. The plot failed. Among those implicated was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who was allowed to commit suicide. American and Free French troops invaded southern France on August 15 in what became known as the “Champagne Campaign.” The Russians moved into Poland in late July and into Romania on August 20. The liberation of Paris took place on August 25, with the Free French army leading the way. A new German offensive from the air began on September 8, when a V-2 rocket landed in Britain.  

U.S. Marines landed on Peleliu Island in the Pacific on September 15. In a daring but vain move, the Allies tried to get behind German lines by landing paratroops near Arnhemin, Holland on September 17 (Operation Market-Garden).Survivors later were evacuated.

On October 2, German troops put down a two-month civilian uprising in Warsaw that was encouraged but not supported by the Soviets.

General MacArthur made good on his promise to return to the Philippine Islands as Americans landed there on October 20. A huge naval engagement between American and Japanese warships, the Battle of Leyte Gulf, followed on October 23 to October 26. The Japanese lost 34 ships.

After retreating through France since D-Day, the German army counterattacked through the Ardennes Forest on December 16. The fight which ensued became known as the Battle of the Bulge. On December 22 the commander of the besieged American garrison, General Anthony McAuliffe, gave a one-word answer when Germans demanded his surrender: “Nuts.” The siege ended on December 26.

1945

More than a million Soviet troops under Zhukov launched an attack against German troops in Poland on January 12. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met in Yalta from February 4–11 to discuss postwar plans.

Royal Air Force and U.S. airplanes firebombed Dresden February 13–15, killing some 50,000 civilians. U.S. Marines landed on Iwo Jima on February 19. On March 7, American troops crossed the Rhine River at Remagen.

The American air force firebombed Tokyo and other Japanese cities on March 9, killing more than 80,000 civilians. On April 1,  American forces invaded Okinawa. The Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated on April 11. The following day, President Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia. Harry Truman succeeded him.

Soviet troops reached Berlin on April 23, and on April 25, American and Soviet forces linked up on the Elbe River.

The former dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, was captured and killed by Italian irregulars on April 28. Hitler committed suicide on April 30 as Russian troops closed in on his bunker. Germany surrendered on May 7. The allies designated May 8 as V-E Day — Victory in Europe. In his victory speech, Churchill reminded his nation that Japan remained unconquered. Never the less, he would be turned out of office on July 26 when British voters chose the Labor Party to lead them.

The atomic bomb was tested successfully in New Mexico on July 16. On August 6, the American war plane Enola Gay dropped the bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Another atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki on August 9. The Japanese surrendered on August 14, and August 15 was designated as V-J Day.

“We cannot look to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep.”

Carl von Ossietzky

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Only one who spent the years following the First World War in Germany can fully understand how hard a battle it was that a man like Ossietzky had to fight. He knew that the tradition of his countrymen, bent on violence and war, had not lost its power. He knew how difficult, thankless and dangerous a task it was. to preach sanity and justice to his countrymen who had been hardened by a rough fate and demoralizing influence of a long war.

In their blindness they repaid him in hatred, persecution and slow destruction; to heed him and to act accordingly would have meant their salvation and would have been a true relief for the whole world.

It will be to the eternal fame of the Nobel Foundation that it bestowed its high honor to this humble martyr and that it is resolved to keep alive the memory of his work. It is also wholesome for mankind today, since the fatal illusion against which he fought has not been removed by the outcome of the last war.

The abstention from the solution of human problems by brute force is the task today as it was then.

Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1956

In memory of Carl von Ossietzky, an investigative journalist who died in hospital in Gestapo custody after being held in various prisons and concentration camps.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. The award was controversial because von Ossietzky had been imprisoned for revealing the illegal steps the German government had been taking to rearm militarily.

There are those who believe that no matter what a country may do, it is the duty of its citizens to obey their laws without objection. And there are those who hold the primacy of natural law and private conscience and moral duty to resist evil even when it has been declared by a temporal authority to be legal.
Carl von Ossietzky was born in Hamburg, the son of Carl Ignatius von Ossietzky (1848–1891), a Protestant from Upper Silesia, and Rosalie (née Pratzka), a devout Catholic and Social Democrat. His father worked as a stenographer in the office of a lawyer and senator, but died when Carl was two years old.

During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919 – 1933), his political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society. He was convicted in 1931 of revealing state secrets, the illegal German militarization, and served 18 months in prison. He was released in 1932.

Ossietzky continued to be a constant warning voice against militarism and Nazism when, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazi dictatorship began. Even then, Ossietzky was one of a very small group of public figures who continued to speak out against the now ruling Nazi Party.

On 28 February 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was taken by the police and held without trial in ‘protective custody’ in Spandau prison. Ossietzky underestimated the speed with which the Nazis would go about ridding the country of unwanted political opponents. He was detained afterwards at the concentration camp KZ Esterwegen near Oldenburg, among other camps.

He was visited while in the camp by Swiss historian Carl Jacob Burkhardt, as a representative of the International Red Cross. Burkhardt described Ossietzky as “a deadly pale broken creature, who seemed numb, with one eye swollen over, and his teeth broken.” Ossietzky said,

“Tell my friends that I have come to the end, soon it will be over and that is good. I hear my wife tried to visit me. I only wanted peace.”

Ossietzky’s international rise to fame began in 1936 when, already suffering from serious illness that was not being treated, he was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize after an international campaign of people who hoped to achieve his release through this recognition and honor. Despite intimidation and protests directed against the Norwegian government, the Nazis had been unable to prevent this, but they now refused to release him so that he could travel to Oslo to receive the prize.

In an act of civil disobedience, after Hermann Göring, then Minister of the Interior for Prussia and head of the police, prompted him to decline the prize, Ossietzky issued a note from the hospital saying that he disagreed with the authorities who had stated that by accepting the prize he would cast himself outside the deutsche Volksgemeinschaft (community of German people).

‘After much consideration, I have made the decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize which has fallen to me. I cannot share the view put forward to me by the representatives of the Secret State Police that in doing so I exclude myself from German society. The Nobel Peace Prize is not a sign of an internal political struggle, but of understanding between peoples. As a recipient of the prize, I will do my best to encourage this understanding and as a German I will always bear in mind Germany’s justifiable interests in Europe.’

The award divided public opinion, and was generally condemned by conservative forces. The leading conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten argued in an editorial that Ossietzky was a criminal who had attacked his country “with the use of methods that violated the law long before Hitler came into power” and that “lasting peace between peoples and nations can only be achieved by respecting the existing laws”.

Ossietzky’s Nobel Prize was not allowed to be mentioned in the German press, and a government decree forbade German citizens from accepting future Nobel Prizes.

The Nobel Peace Prize money was sent to Germany where it was stolen by Ossietzky’s Nazi ‘defense attorney.’

In May 1936 he was sent to the Westend hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg because of his tuberculosis, but under Gestapo surveillance. He was largely forgotten during the period of favorable international regard for the Third Reich, sparked in part by the massive public relations campaign surrounding the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the German ‘economic miracle.’

Ossietzky died in the Nordend hospital in Berlin-Pankow, still in police custody, on 4 May 1938, of tuberculosis and from the after-effects of the abuse he suffered in the concentration camps. In 1938 Time Magazine named Adolf Hitler as their “Man of the Year.”

In November of that year, the Reich entered a new phase of their oppression of dissent and undesirables and those to be cast outside the community of the German people, such as the mentally ill, the disabled, Gypsies, homosexuals, socialists, and trade unionists, with Kristallnacht.

In 1991, the University of Oldenburg was renamed Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in his honor. This could be seen as a political statement, as Ossietzky’s case was being decided upon by the German courts at the time. In 1992 the Federal Court of Justice upheld his 1931 conviction.

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

Martin Luther King

Remember.

“I visited the Esterwegen camp a first time at a re-union of Ossietzky’s old friends at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. We all went to the old concentration campsite,  now a memorial park,  and Chancellor Willy Brandt spoke to us and former inmates. Many came from the Netherlands since Dutchmen were imprisoned. Esterwegen and Oldenburg are close to the Dutch border.

We learned then that Esterwegen had no gas chambers because the stench and smoke would have disturbed the Oldenburg citizens. On my second visit to Esterwegen in 1990 I found a small memorial museum on the old camp grounds and the curator told me that most inmates were German and Dutch socialists, communists and intellectuals.”

Carl von Ossietzky: The Peace Hero In the Concentration Camp by Kurt Singer

In memory of Journalist Carl von Ossietzky

Whatever may be said about national defense against direct attack and the defense of American citizens against terrorist acts (two subjects which I will not address), I believe that American foreign policy tends to consistently violate both Catholic social teaching and prudence in three important ways:

1. Hedonistic Cultural Imperialism: The United States, along with the secular West in general, labors under a profound illusion that the proper—indeed the only—way to secure the common good is to eliminate the influence of tradition, religion and family so as to encourage a secular individualism which enables everybody to do exactly as he pleases. There are enormous flaws in our culture deriving from our blindness in these matters, all of which tend to break down many positive beliefs, habits and institutions which hold society together, foster strong intermediary organizations, strengthen the family, and promote virtue. Yet we export our own brand of individualistic hedonism everywhere we have cultural, economic or political influence. This is not only damaging; it also creates bitter enemies.
2. A World Safe for Democracy: The United States also believes that the only solution to the question of polity in any nation or region is the implementation of Western-style secular democracy as it has evolved in our own culture over the past thousand years. As a result, whenever we do enter a particular country militarily, we are reluctant to depart until we have remade that country in our own political and cultural image, short-circuiting modes of expression and organization common to the surrounding culture, and leaving people with a form of government they are unprepared to understand, let alone implement and sustain. Our idea of “stabilization”, therefore, necessarily involves massive transformations and long commitments to seeing that things are done our way—projects which extend far beyond whatever threat induced us to take military action in the first place.
3. Enforcing Our Own Self-Interest: While the United States seeks to portray itself as altruistic in its foreign policy (and may at times actually be altruistic), the justifications we offer for particular policies and interventions abroad are generally selectively implemented. For example, we may claim to act to eliminate some tyranny, but in fact we generally do not attempt to eliminate all tyranny but select as our targets those countries where some particular self-interest is at stake. Not only do these special interests often give the lie to any motives which might justify an intervention, but the overall impact is to display a remarkable hubris—an assurance that we are always sacrificing ourselves for the good of the rest of the world—which most people in most places find laughable, even on the occasions when it is at least partially true.

These three problems contradict Catholic social teaching in that they misconstrue the nature and ultimate good of the human person, they fail to respect both deeply ingrained human customs and religion itself, and they make of American power an excuse to police the world in ways which demean the equal rights of other peoples. Moreover, sometimes these failures result in a tortured use of just war theory to justify foreign adventures of an extremely dubious and imprudent nature. Finally, our hubris in these matters often causes our nation to overreach what it is really capable of achieving—to overreach, indeed, what any nation is ever capable of achieving.

Please note this important point. We are not wonderfully sensible, noble and good abroad and just the opposite at home, nor vice versa. The same tendencies which result in ill-considered utopian schemes at home lead to ill-considered utopian schemes abroad. The result is that we frequently increase enmity abroad in the name of friendship and support, while overburdening ourselves at home by investing far too much in situations which seem, to a more prudent intelligence, to be beyond our legitimate scope. I am very sad to note, as a Catholic, that too many conservatives in the United States have never met a war they did not like. I often wonder what friends we might have abroad if our foreign policy could be altered to have just the opposite effects!

I have painted these matters with a broad brush. I do not mean to oversimplify any question that arises out of the complexities of peace and security, any more than I mean in my discussion of domestic policies to oversimplify any question that arises out of legitimate human need here at home. Each issue must be examined on its merits. But in the United States, the economics of our perpetual spending on defense makes its own significant contribution to draining us dry. And to a large extent, I think the same argument applies that I have made about domestic concerns. Just as I am convinced we have arrived at a point when it will be almost universally wiser to cut back government intrusion here at home, so too am I convinced that the same is true of our foreign policy.

The world is not our oyster. And even if it were, an overweening, secular, hedonist America would only lose the pearl.

US Defense Spending and Cultural Imperialism.