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Background The quintessence of law is to favor justice as defined by moral principles determining just conduct. For centuries, secular philosophers were pointing out the apparent discrepancy in moral codes based on religious precepts that impose penalties on individuals, but not on large groups of individuals, societies, engaging in activities that harm others. An extreme example is the intentional extermination of human life, murder, in case of serial killers limited to several individuals, in case of societies often resulting in deaths of thousands or millions of human beings. The illegality of wars of aggression was intensely discussed in ancient times. The loss of human life during the World War I prompted the debate about the legality of war-making in the '' League Of Nations .'' Shortly after the cessation of hostilities on the European theatre of the Second World War, Justice Jackson framed the legal principles making the initiation of a war of aggression a supreme crime as follows:
These principles were embodied in the judicial decision of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that the initiation of a war of aggression is not only a crime, but a supreme crime. In the years to follow, the United Nations sponsored the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), to judge persons alleged to be guilty of the supreme crime. This court was voted into existence on July 17 , 1998 by delegates from 120 nations. The only nations voting "no" were the United States , Iraq , Israel , Libya , Qatar , Yemen , and China . CONFLICT RESOLUTION A war, according to Carl Von Clausewitz (1780 - 1831), is ''the continuation of diplomacy by other means,'' i.e., replaces rational Conflict Resolution with violent acts of aggression. According to the basic principles of the conflict-resolution theory, a prerequisite to a solution of a conflict by negotiations is that negotiations are conducted by using reasonable arguments and are not guided by emotions and inconvertible beliefs. This is why the founding fathers of the United States unequivocally affirmed the principle of separation of secular and ecclesiastic powers, a ''sine qua non'' of rational discussion and rational conflict resolution. On the other hand, the incessant and interminable warfare among the monotheistic Theocracies of the Middle East is the living proof that the solution of conflicts of interests is not facilitated, but hindered by strong religious beliefs. RELIGIOUS CANONS AND MORALITY OF WAR According to Bainton (1960), until the Emperor Constantine reign, no known Christian writer approved of war. Afterwards, the church codified the principle of the Just War (''justum bellum''). The Islam's counterpart of the ''just war'' is the notion of '' Jihad ,'' proposed by Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Throughout the ages, Christian and Islamic leaders instigated or sponsored unprovoked wars of aggression, typified by wars expanding the '' Dar Al-Islam '' (lands of Islam) into the '' Dar Al-harb '' (lands of the infidel) and by the Crusades . The cruelty and savagery of the Crusades was later replicated in the Protestant vs. Catholic wars of religion, of which the most devastating was the Thirty Years' War , depopulating many areas of Europe to about a half of the pre-war inhabitants. Throughout Christian history, only Anabaptists and Quakers rejected the notion of the just war while the mainstream religious community, with individual exceptions, either overtly supported or tacitly accepted militarism and wars of conquest. RELIGIOUS AND MILITARIST ATTITUDE STUDIES Among the reviews of the studies scrutinizing relationship between religious and militarist attitudes, Russell's (1971) monograph excels in many respects other meta-studies of this topic. Russell concentrates on studies of the close relationship between Militarism and Nationalism and studies pertaining to the Paradox , that ::'' while universally accepting peace to be a major value, the more devout Christians tend to have stronger militarist attitudes than do the less devout Christians.'' Russell comments that ''"religious belief is probably the most important aspect of a World View "'' and that ''"the Christian belief has dominated Western culture for 2000 years, and is clearly related to the Authoritarian -punitive world view."'' He observes that in the Old Testament, the wars were religious crusades; that God was said to demand these wars and required the utter and complete destruction of the enemy. He concludes that ::''"...by modern standards, such as used at the Nuremberg trials, Yahweh was directing his people to commit Genocide on all who opposed him."'' Russell's observations support the notion that with respect to prohibitions against the collective violence the New Testament is deficient and the Old Testament (and Qur'an ) are not only deficient, but instrumental during the decisive phases of the decision-making processes to initiate a war. Russell's concerns are echoed by the progressive Jewish and Christian theologians, such as Richard Rubenstein , Johann Baptist Metz and Gustavo Gutierrez . In this context Marc H. Ellis , called ''"the most important contemporary Jewish theologian,"'' in his ''Unholy alliance: religion and atrocity in out time'' (1997, p.17) asks: ::''"To find a path beyond atrocity and beyond a religiosity that sponsors and is silent before violence, after thousands of years of Judaism and Christianity, is it part of our fidelity to abandon these religions, at least as we have known them? In doing this, we explore the truths found in opposition to ancient and modern religious understandings that lead to atrocity, and the hope that might energize us to build a world without barbarism, (...) a life that bends toward community rather than empire."'' (Ellis, 1997, pp. xvii, 185). RUSSELL'S PARADOX The conceptual soundness of Russell's paradox is supported by empirical studies such as the study by Krus and Webb (1993) of the January 12th, 1991 Congress vote on the Gulf War, giving President George H. W. Bush war powers. This vote was uniformly interpreted as a party vote by the media, with Republicans voting for and Democrats against the war. However, at that time, Democrats had a majority and thus the pro-war vote was determined not by party-line votes but by cross-over votes. Results of this study, analyzing the relationship between the religious background of the members of the 102nd Congress and their vote on the war, are summarized in Fig.1. Congressmen associated with religious denominations closer to the Old Testament were more likely to support the initiation of the 1991 war against Iraq. Perhaps the most interesting finding of this study of the 1991 Congress vote on the Gulf War was that the Jewish vote was split evenly with 21 Jewish members of Congress voting against the war and 20 voting for the war and did not show any relationship to the continuum in Fig. 1, as the Jewish community is diverse and pursues many diverse interests. If Christianity would not be grafted on Judaism, the Jewish community would be likely viewed and treated as any other other minority. However, Christianity, grafted upon Judaism, ascribes to Jews qualities that are detached from reality. Christians frequently define Jesus Christ as primarily the God and only incidentally a Jew, killed by the Jews. This line of reasoning leads to anti-Semitism. An alternate line of reasoning is that Jesus Christ was primarily a Jew and that Jews are the chosen people, this reasoning leading to philo-Semitism. Ellis (1971, p.51) elaborates this poin as follows: ::''"The contemporary prevalence of philosemitism within the context of Christianity is due to the Christian encounter with the Holocaust. If it is impossible to chart a Christian future that leaves behind the death camps, it is difficult, if not impossible, to envision a positive expression of Christianity with the death camps it helped to construct at its center. Instead, what occurs is an attempt by Christian theologians to use the Holocaust as a way of bypassing the "terminal" condition of Christian belief. If the Holocaust symbolizes the demonization of the Jews and in this way represents the alienation of Christianity from its source, by recovering the beauty of the Judaic faith and by realizing that Israel is chosen and that gentiles are grafted onto that choseness, the history of Christianity can be confessed and jettisoned. By looking to the Jews as the authentic people and themselves as a secondary, grafted upon people, the history of triumphalism comes to be seen as alien, a detour which is now realized as such."'' RELIGIOUS DISPENSATIONALISM Russell's paradox is intensified by the phenomenon of the religious Dispensationalism . Objectively measured, the zeal of fundamentalist Christians and their unconditional support for Israel, is higher among the fundamentalist Christians than among the Jewish community. In general, the U.S. population does not support the initiation of a war. However, in the case of Israel, the fundamentalist Christians tip the scale over the critical 50 percent (Krus & Webb, 2001), as shown in Fig. 2. SPIRITUAL COUNSELING An example of the importance of moral codes as related to the decision to initiate a war is spiritual counseling of President George H. W. Bush by Reverend Graham . As told by Barbara Bush (1994) in her autobiography, the presidential couple was well aware that the decision to go to war will cost human lives and lives of countless children (p. 388): ::''"George told me last night that they decided that it war would start tonight. All America is praying and we are, too. As we said our prayers, his voice cracked and his eyes got misty. I know that those innocent children get to him."'' To obtain spiritual counsel on this matter, they invited Billy Graham to the White House. Graham dispelled the doubts the first family had about killing civilians and, using the notion of the ''just war,'' absolved the President of personal guilt. President Bush I also sought and obtained the support of most religious leaders ''prior'' to initiating the Gulf War . RETROSPECT AND PROSPECTUS That the balance of power is a ''conditio sine qua non'' of existence of the international law and absence of major warfare is the primary axiom of the political science. During the Second World War, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt held a series of discussions with Soviet Premier Stalin. Roosevelt's Son James in his book ''A Family Matter'' (1980) describes their discussion at Yusupov Palace on the southern coast of Crimea in February, 1945, that established the balance of the nuclear power on the world scale that kept a relative peace for a half-of-a-century. This power balance was disturbed when President Reagan convinced Premier Gorbachev that the unipolar world, headed by the benevolent United States, will be a better place to live in. Instead of keeping this promise, the leading elites of the United States initiated an escalating series of wars, as predicted by the Balance Of Power theory of the social science ::''"if the power balance among nations fails, nothing will prevent the dominant superpower to ignore the international law"'' and prognosticated by Samuel P. Huntington in his (1993) '' Clash Of Civilizations .'' It was within this context that Premier Putin called the fall of the Soviet Union :: ''"The greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century."'' In the absence of secular powers to keep peace, intellectual powers and the power of the World Opinion , are among the few remaining factors that may avert conventional and possibly nuclear wars looming on the horizon. Whether these forces will be strong enough to accomplish this task remains the foremost issue of our age. NOTES |
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