This myth asks us to trust that violence will lead to our salvation. By salvation, we mean the preservation of the American way of life. We go to war repeatedly to prop up this system. Each time, our opponents are presented as the embodiment of evil that cannot be reasoned with nor negotiated with. They can only be destroyed.
Dominant countries like ours use the global system to try others for war crimes but always demand that their own citizens be exempt. While torture and assassination by others is evil, for liberal democracies it becomes a tragic necessity. When our enemies behead someone, it reveals their "savagery"; when an ally executes a prisoner, it's to maintain order.
To cope with this burden, we are told to envision a utopian future where justice will reign for all. Of course, justice is perpetually deferred to a future than never quite arrives. As they say, justice delayed is justice denied.
Political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim that Empire (their fancy term for our current political-economic system) makes war into a perpetual activity for preserving the global order. By doing so, the logic of preserving the system at all costs makes war itself good. War becomes a pattern of perpetual police actions to control the "barbarian-terrorists," while local police forces themselves become militarized, and public protest is delegitimized as an internal threat.
Many scholars have rightly criticized political liberalism for never taking seriously the violence committed by the state. To liberalism, this violence is accidental to the state's essential goodness, part of a tragic burden of responsibility. It assumes that we are fundamentally innocent of the violence we enact. But such violence is a form of religious sacrifice. We may not have literal altars and priests to do this work, but we have television pundits and political officials rousing up our sacred duty to kill others for the sake of preserving our way of life. You can't get much more religious than that! Simply put, we are taught to trust in the basic efficacy of redemptive violence one more time.
Redemptive violence is a powerful myth and likely isn't going away anytime soon. Since I was born, the country that I call home has fought and killed in: Lebanon (1982), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989-90), Iraq (1990-91), the Iraq no-fly zones (1991-2003), Somalia (1992-95), Haiti (1994-95), Bosnia (1994-95), Kosovo (1998-99), Afghanistan (2001-present), Iraqagain (2003-2011), Pakistan (2004-present), Yemen (2010-present), Libya (2011), and Syria/Iraq against ISIS (2014-present). This list is abbreviated for space (sorry Philippines, Mali, et al.).
As a Christian pacifist, I sometimes get impatient when people assume pacifism means simply being "against war" and thus refusing to become involved. At their best, pacifists are meant to actively work for peace. This connects with PCU in how we fight instances of "structural violence," i.e. ways in which our dominant systems do violence against people everyday as simply business as usual. I can't stop the violence we commit as a nation or the violence we justify among our allies, but each of us can resist such violence by fighting the violent systems in our own backyard. For there is no such thing as redemptive violence, whether it comes in the form of grinding economic exploitation, militant policing of neighborhoods, extraction of death-dealing fossil fuels, or more boots on the ground.
Peace must be waged,
Timothy Murphy
Executive Director