“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.” -Lord Vetinari, Guards! Guards!

As I was driving in to work today I sat in traffic behind a guy with political stickers on his car. Plastered above the “Worst President Ever” and “Pox News” decals was a long homemade banner that read simply: END THE OCCUPATION.

Now, to refer to the ongoing military action in Iraq as an “occupation” is, at best, an oversimplification. While the ongoing presence of American troops in that theater is troubling to me, it remains that they are currently shoring up an extremely delicate balance of power, one that could cause serious consequences for the entire region if it falls. No doubt there are many Iraqis who would admit, at least grudgingly, that they need us there right now. But that does not change the fact that this venture looks and feels like a hostile occupation to much of the civilized world.

I continued to ponder the uncomfortable complexities of the situation for the rest of my drive. It is probably fruitless to speculate on the motivations of the people who initially pushed for the invasion of Iraq; short of a signed confession, it would be impossible to prove whether or not they were maliciously seeking personal gain or merely acting rashly on the basis of bad intelligence. What can be established fairly easily is that most of those who initially supported the war, and thus made its execution possible, were acting on the basis of a very simple idea:

If we can just stop the bad guys, everything will be better.

In this case, as in so many cases, stop meant capture, or kill, or otherwise beat into submission with the use of overwhelming force.  We who supported the invasion of Iraq believed that, if we could just eliminate Saddam Hussein and his evil minions, the yoke of tyranny in Iraq would be lifted and the people would be free to build a responsible, proper government — which is to say, one that looks like ours. All we had to do was “get the bad guys.”

This notion that we can build a better world through the use of force is called the doctrine of redemptive violence — and of all the myths that humanity has clung to, it is by far the deadliest.

The myth of redemptive violence is practically ubiquitous in human culture. We see it in countless books, films, and television shows. It infects our popular music, our criminal justice system, and our foreign policy.

• Abolitionists used it to justify attacking slaveowners in the “Bloody Kansas” years prior to the American Civil War.
• Southerners who believed they were defending their economic livelihoods used it to justify their attack on the Union forces at Fort Sumter.
• The Western nations used it to justify the escalation of a regional conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia into what became known as World War I.
• Lenin used it as the justification for the Red Revolution, which overthrew the oppressive Czar and was ostensibly intended to institute a just government of the people in his place.
• America used it to justify the horrific deaths of 100,000 Japanese civilians in the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and another 70,000 in the two atomic strikes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• The Allied and Chinese forces both used it to justify their involvement in the Korean civil war in the 1950s, and the American and Russian forces used it to justify meddling in Vietnam.
• The Israeli Defense Force uses it to justify their repeated incursions into Palestinian neighborhoods, and Palestinian militants use it to justify their rocket attacks and suicide bombings in Israel civilian centers.
• And now, we Americans have used it to justify deposing Saddam Hussein, and the Mahdi Army and the Wahabists use it to justify attacking our “occupying” forces (as well as each other).

If you asked these people what they were doing, their answers would all boil down to basically the same thing: We’re fighting the bad guys. We’re making them pay. We’re going to destroy them so that what’s good can triumph. The problem is that while good and evil may well be absolute qualities, our human ability to perceive them accurately is neither wholly accurate nor wholly reliable. Everybody perceives themselves as being the heroes of their own story; nobody knowingly fights for the forces of evil.

Our vision is flawed; we humans cannot be blameless warriors of The Good because we cannot always know what The Good is. And even if our goals are just, even if our intentions are righteous, our willingness to wreak violence and death upon our fellow man pollutes our spirits and taints our actions.

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;

help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;

help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;

help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief;

help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it –

for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

-Mark Twain, The War Prayer

There is no such thing as a holy war. There may, sadly, at times be such a thing as a necessary war, but we should go forth with no illusions about what we do. War is, ever and always, an evil act. It is institutionalized killing, ritual homicide. All warfare is based in spite — the willingness to hurt one’s self and one’s children in order to hurt someone else even more. And we commit the most grevious sin of pride and arrogance when we assume that God Almighty stands behind us and gives approval to our actions because of the rightness of our cause.

Jesus Christ saw the myth of redemptive violence for what it was. Time and again, he sternly warned his followers against answering opposition with violence:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. -Matthew 5:38-45

“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” -Matthew 26:52

And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them, and they went to another village. -Luke 9:52-56

Christ’s opposition to redemptive violence was one of the most radical and significant parts of his message, and it is probably the part that has been most widely ignored. Those who honor the Prince of Peace are all too quick to resort to war when we are convinced that it is necessary, or that the people we are fighting are really bad and deserve what we’re going to do to them. We discount the words of Jesus as applying merely to our personal lives, and not to the actions of nations; or we dismiss them as an unacheivable ideal, a laudable goal but one that cannot possibly work in the real world.

But how do we know? We do not attempt the way of peace because, in our hearts, we label Christ as an idealistic fool and discard his path before we even begin. Or else we mistake his message for a call to quietly submit to evil, when in truth he was calling for nonviolent resistance of the sort that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. would later employ against their oppressors. Rejecting the myth of redemptive violence means looking for creative, constructive alternatives to reciprocal homicide. It means actively looking for the third way that stands between capitulation and violent resistance. The path may be arduous, and it may be hard to see, but it is there.

As I continue my efforts at writing and storytelling, one of my objectives is to undermine and subvert the myth of redemptive violence. I don’t want the good guys to win just because they were more powerful or more vicious or more clever than the enemy; I want them to find success because they sought the third way and looked for options beyond the use of force. When the use of force becomes inevitable — or when the protagonists believe it is inevitable — I want to show the cost of it, to make them feel the burden of the violence that they do. If I do my job right, you will not see the heroes laying waste to the enemy and walking happily off into the sunset. That image is a pernicious lie, and I want no part in perpetuating it.

If the myth of redemptive violence is to die, it must die in the way of all myths: because enough people stood up and questioned it, repudiated it, named it for the lie that it was. All our violence and all our killing will not make a better world. If we can convince people of that fact — our children, our neighbors and, above all, ourselves — then maybe we do have a chance at making things better. But it has to start here, now, with us.