“There is no flag large enough
to cover the shame of killing
innocent people.”
Years ago, just before the beginning of the war in Iraq. a community we belonged to at the time was debating about sending a letter to the President opposing the war in Iraq. One of the members brought up the “Just War Theory” of the Catholic church as a way to justify the war in Iraq. One of elder members, a long time philosophy professor at Marquette University stood up and said: “The just war theory blew up with the dropping of the Atom bomb on Hiroshima.”
In the Christian church two persons St. Augustine of the 5th century and St. Thomas Aquinas of the 13th century are credited for the development of the Just War Theory. Conservatives and Liberals, Republicans and Democrats use the Just War Theory to justify wars and violence. Even President Obama, according to a recent article in the New York Times article uses the just war theory of St. Augustine and St. Thomas to justify his secret “kill list.’’
There is one major defect in using the Just War Theory to justify modern day wars. The word and concept of ‘war’ had a completely different meaning in the 5th century of St. Augustine and the 13th century of St. Thomas Augustine than what war means in the 21st century. What they called ‘war’ was most hand to hand conflict. There were no automatic M-14 rifels, no bombs, no missles, to Apache helicopters, no Killer Drones and certain no atomic bombs. St. Thomas and St. Augustine built their moral principles of a just war on what they understood as “war”. There was no concept of killing with technology or war as preemptive or EndlessWars.
Some great persons of old, like Jesus, and some great persons of our times, like Dorothy Day or Martin Luther King Jr. or Thomas Merton understood that modern warfare could not be justified. We praise these persons but do not follow them. I believe that St. Thomas and St. Augustine would be outraged how their theory is being used to justified modern war.
Even those who use the Just War Theory to show how modern wars are not justified are missing the point. Simply said, there is no just war theory that fits war in our times.
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