06/04/09 – Laurence M. Vance – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
His name is Lawrence M. Vance.
He's the author of Christianity and War, and other essays against the warfare state, as well as his newest book, The Revolution That Wasn't.
He is a Ph.
D. teacher and publisher, and editor of the Classic Reprint series, director of the Francis Whelan Institute, and again, regularly writes for LewRockwell.com, and you can also find him quite often on the blog at Antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Lawrence.
How are you?
I'm great, Scott.
Good to be here.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here on the show.
It's been too long since we've spoken, but you have been very outspoken, especially recently, well, I guess always, against the warfare state, as you call it in the title of your book, and especially against torture.
And it's been in the news recently that, according to the polls anyway, the more somebody goes to church, the more likely they are to support torture.
The more Christian they are, the more they support things that would seem to the average, uninformed, not-so-religious guy like myself to be a complete contradiction of Christianity.
And I guess I'd like to say I'm very happy to see from your writings at Antiwar.com that I'm right.
That's not very Christian at all.
What's going on here?
How come it is that American Christians tend to support the most heinous acts of their government, Lawrence, do you think?
Well, this is an extremely disheartening thing that I see.
I mean, it's one thing for Christians to be deceived and support the war on Iraq and the war on terrorism and things like that.
That's bad enough.
But to actually see Christians come out for torture?
I mean, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was tortured.
He was beaten, and he was spit upon, and he was crucified until death.
And yet Christians talk now about how it's okay to torture people?
This just boggles my mind that Christians can hold these opinions.
Obviously they're not getting them out of the New Testament that they profess to believe.
I think that these Christians are so in bed with the Republican Party and the conservative movement and their love for the military that they're just totally blinded to what their faith actually teaches.
Well, are you sure it's nothing about Christianity itself that makes them lean toward that kind of, well, for example, and pardon me for my cynicism, but blind faith in whichever leader, whether it's Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount or whether it's George Bush and his Sermon on Capitol Hill?
Well, Christians, and I have heard arguments that torture is, it's not surprising that Christians come out for torture because after all, don't they believe that God is going to torture people into hell for all eternity?
And my reply to that would be there's a big difference between a sinful man torturing another man and a holy God punishing a sinner.
So those things are miles apart.
So there's nothing in Christianity, there's nothing in the Bible that could possibly lead a Christian to support torture.
Nothing whatsoever.
Well, isn't the history of early Christianity that not just Jesus but all of his early followers were the tortured?
Exactly.
I mean, we've come full circle.
The Christians were persecuted for their faith, and some of them were tortured, some of them were fed to the lions, some of them were crucified like our Lord, and yet now Christians are abdicating torture.
They're not just excusing it or defending it, they're abdicating torture.
And some of them are saying, oh, it's just a form of capital punishment.
Not capital punishment, corporal punishment.
But, I mean, you don't have any kids, right, Scott?
No, I don't.
If you had a young child that misbehaved, would you take a power drill and take it to his body?
I mean, this is totally ridiculous.
It does seem kind of an inconsistent way of looking at the world, but I guess the biggest symptom here, really, because as you say, there's nothing, at least certainly as far as I know, and believe me, I'm willing to take your word for it, there's nothing that Jesus said that would excuse, much less advocate, anything like this.
And yet what we're really dealing with is a personal identification where Christian isn't something someone believes, in many cases, as much as a group that they're a part of.
And we're the Christians, and everyone else is not.
And so everything becomes a matter of us versus them, and the them lose their humanity.
I mean, after all, we're talking about a torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, not Jesus here.
These are people who are all condemned anyway, and so forth.
That's an unfortunate attitude, because even though Christians believe that Christianity is the truth and the Bible is the word of God and the Koran is not the word of God and Islam is a false religion, there's nothing in our Bible that would say that we should have that attitude toward people that differ from us, that we should treat them any differently, that we should think it's okay if they're tortured.
Absolutely nothing in the New Testament that should lead a Christian to have an attitude like that.
Now, you're from the South, and you're a Baptist, right?
Right.
So what makes you not a conservative?
I mean, other than your difference with them on torturing people, for example.
Well, conservatives of late seem like they support war, torture, the warfare state, militarism, big government.
And yet at the same time that conservatives are supporting these things, they are talking about liberty and freedom and free markets.
And this is why I think conservatives are much more dangerous than liberals, because liberals, Obama doesn't talk about the free market and liberty.
He doesn't try to hide the fact that he is, in fact, nothing but a socialist.
But these Republicans and these conservatives, they mask their horrible support for war and secret prisons and torture and military tribunals and just the violation of civil liberties that we saw under Bush.
They believe these things, and then yet they talk about liberty and they talk about human rights.
They complain about China doesn't honor human rights, and they're just such a bunch of hypocrites.
Ron Paul was just mentioning something the other day about China.
I guess it's the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square ordeal in China, and the U.S. government is passing resolutions and criticizing China.
But hey, we're the ones that need to look in the mirror.
Yeah, that whole speck in your eye, beam in mine, that kind of thing.
Exactly.
I mean, U.S. foreign policy and U.S. militarism is the cause of so much unrest in the world, not China.
I don't recall China having troops in any country except China.
But yet we have troops in almost 150 countries around the world.
So who are we to talk about human rights and weapons of mass destruction and militarism?
We need to look in the mirror.
Well, when it comes to the war in the Middle East, so many Southern Christians, especially it seems, believe that the Bible mandates that America must protect the state of Israel.
You don't buy that?
Is that not in your same Bible?
Help me out with the confusion here.
Well, I don't see anything in the Bible that God needs America's help to protect Israel.
God can certainly protect Israel on his own without our help.
In fact, America's not even in the Bible, is it?
What's that?
North America's not even in the Bible anywhere.
And what makes things worse is we're not protecting Israel, we're hurting Israel.
We're propping up their socialist economy with all this foreign aid we give them.
And we're creating terrorists by our actions around the world and our interventions in the Middle East and these other countries.
And our support for these regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt that definitely, I mean, until recently women couldn't even drive in some of these countries, and yet these are our allies.
So we're not protecting Israel, we're hurting Israel by our actions and by our foreign aid.
Yeah, well that's a point that, I don't know, I guess for some reason is just a bridge too far.
People just, I guess, assume that the government is at least trying their best to do right, and that goes for the Israeli government too, and that support for them equals support for them.
The idea that support for them leads them further down the path toward destruction is not really part of the argument most times, is it?
Well, I think there's a distinction that has to be made between the people of Israel and the government of Israel.
I mean, the government of Israel is a government, which means it's a corrupt government, just like every government on the face of the earth.
There's nothing special about it.
So there's a big difference between supporting the people of Israel and supporting every policy of the government of Israel.
And so many Christians, they don't make that distinction.
They think whatever the government of Israel says is okay.
And I make that distinction.
I say that's ludicrous.
So just how anti-war are you, Lawrence?
If we go back in history and pick and choose American wars, I guess everyone's favorite war is World War II against the fascists in Japan, Italy, and Germany.
Was it the right thing for people to join the military to fight in that one?
You know, I'm glad you brought that up, because I just wrote a big article yesterday on Pat Buchanan's book.
In fact, we're running it in our viewpoint section on AntiWar.com right now.
Okay.
That was on Lou Rockwell yesterday.
And World War II is pictured as the good war.
And I would simply ask the question, what's so good about it?
420,000 American soldiers died.
Now, how many men were killed at Pearl Harbor?
2,500 maybe?
3,000?
420,000 American soldiers died to avenge that?
I think that's absolutely ludicrous.
Well, but there's no arguing the pure, malevolent evil of the Nazi regime, for example.
Exactly.
I mean, I'm not excusing that in any way.
But Stalin was worse, and he was our ally.
That doesn't make any sense to me at all.
Stalin was much worse than Hitler and killed many millions of his own people, and yet he was our ally against Hitler?
That doesn't make any sense to me at all.
Yeah, and of course, as bad as Japan was in China, Mao Zedong took over from there.
Exactly.
And he was even worse than Stalin.
Who knows how many millions and millions of Chinese people that that depraved killer is responsible for their death.
So U.S. foreign policy is so screwed up that it's just incredible that we can call any war a good war.
And Buchanan's book, as I wrote in my article, is so important, because here we are, what, 70 years after the beginning of World War II?
And yet, whenever anybody wants to justify the war in Iraq, they'll always say, well, some wars are just and necessary, and they always point to World War II, like that's just supposed to shut us up and say, oh, well, yeah, you're right.
And I don't buy that.
Yeah, it's certainly true that World War II is kind of, it seems to me, has even replaced George Washington and them as the founding myth of America at this point.
Exactly.
And then this evil of Hitler is used today.
You know, the leader of Iran is Hitler.
What about George Washington and the American Revolution from the English?
What was the duty of a Christian in those times, Lawrence?
The duty of a Christian would be to support liberty and to stand against tyranny.
And, of course, looking at George Bush, the tyranny of George III doesn't look too bad now.
Yeah, it almost makes you think a good Christian should have been a Tory back then to prevent all this catastrophe.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, all right, so I'm trying to make up excuses to try to poke holes in your theory here or something.
What if America had stayed out of World War II and the Nazis had conquered all of Europe and made a peace with Stalin, built up a giant navy to conquer England and conquer the United States of America?
At some point, is it OK for a young man to put on olive green and grab a rifle in order to commit acts of violence against some other country's army?
Only if it's a defensive war.
Germany could not cross the English Channel to conquer England.
How in the world could anyone possibly think they could cross the Atlantic Ocean and be a threat to the United States?
Now, suppose that that did in fact happen.
Well, then it would be perfectly justified to take up arms in defense.
But fighting 4,000 miles away is never in defense of your country.
So it's not that you're a total pacifist.
You still are an individualist in the sense of people's right to resist violence with at least equal violence.
It's just that you don't categorize anything that the Americans have been doing as of the last hundred years at least as fitting in that category.
Exactly.
And here's why we would never need a draft.
If America was really attacked, a genuine attack, then you wouldn't have to draft people.
People would be taking up their guns and going to repel invaders on both coasts.
So a purely defensive military action against an invader I wouldn't have any problem with.
That would be self-defense.
And then you brought up a good point, maybe not realizing it.
You said repel them with equal force, something like that.
You wouldn't go firebomb Dresden and all these cities in Germany.
How is that equal force when Germany never even attacked us to begin with?
Especially when we know that FDR put off doing anything even so much as disrupt the rail lines to the death camps until the very last thing.
They were even forbidden from putting them on their secondary target list in this case the first target was covered with clouds and they had to go back, bomb something else on the way back.
They were disallowed from doing anything to interfere with the death camps at the same time they were burning all the civilians of Dresden and a hundred other German cities to the ground.
FDR and Churchill, and I mention this a little bit in my article, FDR and Churchill were evil men and war mongers.
And I know that you've interviewed people about FDR and Pearl Harbor before.
Sure, Robert Stinnett, the author of Day of Deceit.
Exactly.
Yeah, I just made a gratuitous assertion all over Ray McGovern's interview that he chose to not respond to about that.
But it seems to me a pretty open and shut case that as of 1999, enough declassified material has finally been released that it's clear that not just the diplomatic codes at all, the naval codes had been broken, that they knew good and well there was an attack coming and turned a blind eye to it back in 1941.
But see, even if the Pearl Harbor attack was not provoked, which we know it was, and even if it was a complete surprise and a day that will live in infamy and all that, even if all that's true, which of course it isn't, is World War II an appropriate response to that?
I mean, it's like, is the war in Iraq an appropriate response to 9-11?
We lost about 2,800 people, many of them not even Americans, and now we've got 5,000 dead Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We've got a million dead Iraqis and counting, a million people.
Americans don't care about that.
They're just ragheads.
They don't mean anything.
That's a very important point, too, is the bigotry here.
I mean, when we talk about, and I'm not just choosing to pick on this group for purposes of this interview, except that that's what this interview is about.
When we're talking about Southern Christians and their support for the Republican military state at least, and the Democratic one, and their support for all this war, inherent in it is a lot of white men versus the poor brown people of the world, just like it's always been, isn't it?
Yeah, I mean, it was the Filipinos.
You know, after the Spanish-American War, when we didn't let the Philippines become completely independent, we had no problem.
Well, actually, it goes back to the Indians, of course.
Not the way we slaughtered the Indians, but the Filipinos, and then the Vietnamese and Cambodians.
I don't know, what, up two million people maybe killed from our adventure in Vietnam?
Yeah, people still say, 58,000 people died in that war.
And you still have Christians defend Vietnam, which I still find incredible, because they know nothing about the history of how we got in Vietnam, how we supported the French, because they tried to retake control of Vietnam after World War II, and we supported the French, and then when they finally left, we got involved ourselves.
It's just incredible.
The things that come out of the mouth of some Christians are an embarrassment to me, when they make statements about, we should torture these people to get information, or we could have won in Vietnam, and the war on terror, and the war in Iraq.
And again, this is all a betrayal of what the Bible teaches.
This is all about us versus them, and racist collective identities, and guilt, and all these things.
Is there anything in Jesus' teachings that justify bigotry and condemning the other, because you haven't met him yet, and he lives somewhere else, and maybe wears a funny hat, or looks a little different, or whatever?
Of course not.
And what you should be hearing in churches today is about the need to send missionaries to these countries to preach Christianity.
To save them.
Okay, because if Christians believe what they say they believe, that's what they ought to be emphasizing.
But instead, you hear about the need to send U.S. troops to kill people.
All right, everybody.
That's Lawrence M. Vance.
The book is Christianity and War, and other essays against the warfare state.
I think I had a dream that I left a box of these at my sister's church in Austin.
I think I'm going to do that.
That's pretty powerful.
Maybe Jesus sent me the Holy Spirit.
It's Lawrence M. Vance.
Christianity and War.
Other essays against the warfare state.
Juno Publications is the name of your website, right?
Vance Publications.
Vance Publications.
VancePublications.com.
And you can find them, again, at LewRockwell.com and also at AntiWar.com on the blog regularly.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you.