Rethinking US Foreign Policy in Syria

    Is it ethical to take part in supporting one side in a foreign civil war?  I would put forward that it is only ethical on the large scale where American support would ensure a swift and efficient end to hostilities.  I lobby that the slow and tepid American support of anti-Assad factions in Syria is actually less humane than staying out of the conflict despite the tragic validity of the rebel cause.   If we truly cared about the wellbeing of the Syrians, we would have invaded the country en masse.  Instead, we have prolonged the civil war by using the rebels as a proxy fight against Russia.   Perhaps the Russian troop drawdown will impact American policy or allow for a quick resolution, but our record of answering atrocities with short and shallow speeches is not promising.  Imagine two great outside forces taking sides in the American Civil War.  Sure, each side would have welcomed assistance, but at what cost?  What if the war had lasted years longer because each time one side came close to defeat it received an influx of supplies from a third party?  What if these were never enough supplies to actually turn the tide of the war but instead felt more like a pay day loan that keeps someone who is treading water from drowning completely if only for a little while.  History would look back at this hypothetical situation with disdain and condemn the person in the boat for only throwing out a couple of children’s lifejackets when they could have reached out a hand and pulled the victim up over the side once and for all. 

    Syria needs regime change, and it needs it quickly – but if we are not prepared to push hard to make it happen we have no business prolonging someone else’s civil war.  If we continue with mild support, the currently six-year-old conflict could continue for many more.  Go big or go home should be the mantra of an American Doctrine of Compassion.  And if you believe that it is not in our interest to be majorly involved in another ground war in the Middle East at this time, the hard decision to stop trying to help must be made.  At what point does being ruled by a tyrant outweigh thousands of civilians dying in the streets for over half a decade?  After all, it is all relative anyway.  For those ideologues who will stand up and decry my position as inhumane, you must ask yourself the question: why Syria?  Are their people any more valuable than the citizens of Iran or the debacle of Libya that we so cleanly washed our hands of already?  Our foreign policy in the region is inconsistent at best and borders on whimsical at worst.  What values are we currently standing on in Syria – it certainly is not human rights.

#remembertheredline

The Prophetic Background of President Reagan’s Challenger Speech

    As we marked the 30 year anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster this past week, I knew that I wanted to hear President Ronald Reagan’s iconicly comforting speech once again.  Having read most of President Reagan’s speeches from his long career, I appreciate well crafted rhetoric that truly inspires the listener.  The day of the challenger disaster was no different.  Scheduled to give the State of the Union Address to Congress that very night, Reagan’s plans for January 28, 1986 took a much darker turn after the seven person crew of the space shuttle Challenger died instantly when their ship exploded 73 seconds after liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Florida due to a faulty rubber seal.  No doubt having just spent days refining a major policy speech that was destined to be postponed, the president took the national television stage from behind his desk in the oval office instead.  He spoke of the first couple’s personal sadness at the news of such a great loss.  He continued to speak of a resolute vision to continue space exploration despite tragedy.  But he ended his speech with these haunting words: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."[1]

    What most people don’t know is that the president was actually quoting from a poem written by a Canadian fighter pilot who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II.  Born in Shanghi, China in 1922, John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was the son of Canadian and American parents serving as Anglican missionaries to the region.  He was an avid writer of poetry as a young adult.  One such poem he titled High Flight after composing it in August of 1941.  He included it in a letter to his father, now a minister, on September 3, 1941.  On December 11, only four days after America was attacked at Pearl Harbor, the young pilot took off in a Spitfire on a training mission near Lincolnshire, England.  Diving out of the clouds at high speed, he collided midair with another plane at 1,400 feet – a height too low for a parachute to successfully open.  Magee died at the age of 19, but his poem lives on in the Library of Congress today and in the hearts of millions because of its first and last lines: "Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth […] Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."[2]  A fitting, if not prophetically chilling connection to the midair disaster 45 years later, neither the Challenger crew nor Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee should be forgotten.

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[1] Click HERE for President Reagan's full speech.

[2] Full text of High Flight: "Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.

Where never lark, or even eagle flew —

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God."

Legalized Looting of the Less Fortunate is Never the Best Option

The government of Denmark is currently debating the controversial proposal to confiscate valuables from all asylum seeking refugees attempting to enter their country as an ad hoc form of payment for services that the Government is predicting that they will provide at an equal or higher cost.  There are several ethical problems with this proposed solution, and we must address the most obvious first.  On a base and completely amoral level, confiscation prior to any service being provided to them is misguided as a free market principle.  What services are being offered?  What guarantee will there be that these do indeed equal the value of the property seized?  A big issue relating to this is the reality that everyone will possess items of varied intrinsic value.  While some may have a cell phone and a wedding ring, others may have a case of reserve cash, precious metals, or a valuable watch.  At its heart, this socialist principle that takes everything from all to provide for the whole will only lead to corruption and distrust. 

Secondly, what hope do you have in a government for giving refuges a better life in their future if they strip them bare of anything that might have helped them get started on the road to prosperity in their new life?  This is placing the entire responsibility of their success in the hands of government officials and truly dropping everyone to the lowest common denominator rather than looking to embrace those who might contribute to society in a positive way much sooner if they had private assets with which to buy goods and services that they deem necessary.  But of course, the government would have to tell them what was necessary if they get their way.

Now we get to the heart of the issue.  This is not an effort to recover costs.  This is truly a deterrent masquerading as a tariff on humanity.  While those in America that called out for a ban on refugees were often misguided and angry, all who spoke out were vilified.  The EU has given little space for dissenters as well, so this action allows for a de facto ban on refugees that will be self imposed, all the while saving face with those who require them to keep their borders open.  If passed, this will become a big issue only if refugee quotas are enforced, and all of a sudden, thousands of refugees are assigned to go to Denmark without a choice of their own and they are robbed blind at the border.

We have seen where this leads.  History has shown us in the form of stolen artwork from Jewish homes across Europe and mountains of gold fillings in concentration camps.  This legalized covetousness will only lead to an increase in the social divide between ethnic minorities and those in power.  Ban all refugees or accept them with open arms, but do not make them purchase your salvation by stripping them of the last vestiges of their lifelong possessions.  Thievery does not become us as humans - we waste far more in political adds everyday than what you would ever hope to gain by robbing the needy.

Robin Hood was Not a Socialist: How a Story of Justice has been Transformed into Marxism

The story has always been one of my favorites: the nobleman of a bygone era fights to right the injustices enacted upon his people by the newly arrived foreign occupiers who were exploiting every avenue to abuse their new subjects.  The beauty of the story is its simplicity (and the epic sword fights).  The message of the classic story is good versus evil; no complex characters to speak of.  The characters were either good or they were bad, and we as spectators never felt compassion or empathy for the bad guys, nor did we feel that they had earned their great wealth.  We saw the wealthy and opulent Norman rulers of England for what they were (in the story).  That is, conquerors living off of the backs of those they had conquered.

Recently, I was reading while my children watched a modern retelling of the story of Robin Hood in a daily children’s show on PBS.  I was paying little attention except for the occasional glance until the plot thickened.  In their version, a princess was carrying so many potatoes that she was unable to lift them while a poor character had only a few potatoes that were going to be too few to feed her.  Both characters complained about their situation.  One naturally decried her lack of food, while the other bemoaned having too much.  As I looked up from my reading to see how they would handle this travesty against human logic, I noted that Robin’s task at this point was not one of ‘robbing the rich’ so to speak, but rather helping the afterwards thankful wealthy character redistribute her burdensome abundance to her poor compatriot.  Everyone left happy – except me.

This retelling of the classic tail decries the basic flaws in the thinking of many today.  The first issue is the obvious misunderstanding of the issue at the root of the original Robin Hood tale.  At its heart, the story is not about an economic system at all.  In 1066, William the Conqueror ushered in a new era in England when he led his Norman army to victory in the Battle of Hastings.  In the years that followed, many French speaking Normans seeking fortune and status poured across the Slightly-Less-English Channel to take a place in the newly expanded kingdom.  The real history is more complicated, but in the Robin Hood story, they never earn their wealth in England.  They did not work hard to achieve it, but they did enjoy it.  In fact, they put down every challenge that attempted to take this wealth and status from them.  In short, we did not sympathize with them as capitalists because they had not earned their wealth – they had taken it. 

A second issue raised by this flaccid reinvention of the story is the assumption that ‘plenty’ is a burden to those who experience it.  While I am sure there are a precious few individuals out there who feel undue pressure because of having too much, the vast majority of people who do well in any area of society are in fact pleased rather than tortured by the experience.  This does not have to be limited to our understanding of wealth alone.  For example, if a farmer has a much better than average yield, they are excited – even if it will not all fit in the barn.  They are excited because this influx means new opportunities for them as well as signaling and affirming their successful use of farming methods and hard work to get to this point.  If they do chose to give to their neighbor, it is then done out of generosity and benevolence, not out of a desire to throw their precious cargo overboard.  In a capitalist system, if someone works hard to gain something, they are very upset if that is taken from them.  In fact, the legal system regards this as theft unless it is due to taxation.

In the classic Robin Hood story, the Normans understood this ethical conundrum and usurped it by qualifying every illegal seizure as taxation.  This gave them the legal high ground, despite simultaneously holding court in the moral gutter.  A modern understanding of the issue fails to see the element of injustice as the driving force in what motivated the fictional Robin Hood and many other actual historical heroes to leave lives of safety and security to fight for the rights of the downtrodden.  Historically, no one risks death, loss of all status and property, and lack of access to their soul mate on a daily basis to redistribute wealth.  In the real story, and the real world, everyone does not want to do the right thing, and injustices have to be righted – be it by fictional vigilantes or by the justice system. 

So, Robin Hood was not, nor should he ever be a socialist.  He was never interested in helping the rich relocate their assets to those around them that were in need.  They stole it, he took it back, and they hated him for it.  In the PBS version, both parties thanked Robin Hood after a successful utilization of Solomonic wisdom.  Our society is selling an attitude that does not exist in real life, logical humans.  A socialist society has no need for a hero, but glorifies the collective instead.  My question for the children’s television show is: who grew the potatoes?  It was never addressed, and I am afraid we as a society have lost our interest in asking this question in real life as well.  

Who grew the potatoes?  No one cares anymore.   

Should a Christian Defend American Exceptionalism?

King Louis XVI lost his head to the French Revolution on 21 January 1793, primarily because of the root notion that he was born great.   His over-zealous constituents failed to share his self-admiration, and constructed a devise that would attempt to sever this very concept of Divine Right not only from his body (which it did quite handily by all accounts) but also from every elitist-thinking mind on earth.

As America flirts with disaster around the world and tries to climb out of the foreign policy tar pit she wandered into over the past several years, her citizens are faced with the opportunity and often responsibility to truly defend their core ideology of freedom for the first time in their lives.  Are we really a blight on the world stage?  Was there ever anything special about the United States?  Many American Christians struggle with how to address these questions.  On one hand, they feel they should defend their patriotism with a resounding ‘yes’ to all of the above.  But on the other, they feel the weight of the shared condition of humanity and have tasted too much of the grace offered by a loving Messiah to look past their own sin and claim to be anything greater than the rest of the world.  After all, what is a true Christian except someone who first understands their extreme need for salvation because of their own depravity?   Is there even space for anyone to be exceptional in Christian theology?  One of the founding fathers actually addressed this same paradox.  Benjamin Franklin alongside Silas Deane wrote this note while in Paris in 1777 during the height of the American Revolution:[1]

Tyranny is so generally established in the rest of the world, that the prospect of an asylum in America for those who love liberty, gives general joy, and our cause is esteemed the cause of all mankind […] We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature.  Glorious is it for the Americans to be called by Providence to this post of honor.[2]

There is a difference between being inherently great and being called to do great things.  For the American Christian, God has granted an immeasurable occasion for being about the business of greatness.  To answer one’s calling and to do it well is never a mark of shame.  A good Biblical example comes in Exodus 31 when God mentions to Moses that he has “called by name Bezalel” and his fellow craftsman Oholiab to spearhead much of the detail work on the Tabernacle – the house of worship that would be replaced by the Temple generations later.  The text continues: “And I have given to all able men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you.”  God called these men out of obscurity, equipped them with knowledge, and placed them in the setting for doing great things.

Sitting in pre-Revolution Paris on diplomatic business, Franklin certainly understood the complexities of favoring the American system of freedom over those of other nations.  Perhaps he could have gained more political points with his would-be allies if he had claimed that the French monarchy had its merits too.  But he unashamedly called America an asylum from the tyranny that plagued the rest of the world. 

This same tyranny still survives across so much of the world today, and Christians in America must realize that to understand American Exceptionalism is to understand the concept of calling.  They should agree with Franklin that Americans did not make themselves great, but rather, they simply answered the call to greatness.  I would urge all American Christians to put aside any sense of entitlement or arrogance that they may hold on to lest we become a nation waiting in line for our own cultural guillotine.  Instead, they should unashamedly remind others of those great individuals upon whose shoulders we stand that answered their own call and answered it well.  And they must never forget that excuses do not work when you are called.  For America to continue to be a great nation, exceptional individuals must continue to rise up and offer hope of a better future to those walking in darkness both at home and abroad.  Thus American Exceptionalism is a Providential gift that should never become past tense in the heart of American Christians.

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[1] Silas Deane was an on-again-off-again supporter of American Independence.  He died shortly after returning from a visit to France only a few years before the Revolution there.

[2] As quoted in Paul A. Varg’s Foreign Policies of the Founding Fathers (Michigan State University Press, 1963), page 3.

McCarthy has Left the Building

    In light of the recent shift in US/Cuba policy, I had to ask myself: ‘what changed?’  While I was busy worrying about Ebola, mid-term elections, and government shutdowns, did the Castro boys skip town?  Were the lack of diplomatic relations with Cuba just a forgotten holdover from the United States’ Cold War policy, or was there something different with the island nation in December of 2014?  What changed last week to cause President Obama’s announcement?  The answer: very little.

    In the 1990s, the United States began to normalize relations with Russia and the former Soviet nations, and some people have drawn a comparison between the current action and that as if the US had simply forgotten to end the Cold War with its closer neighbor in the Caribbean.  The reality is quite different.  Russia underwent a massive shift in leadership, direction, and policy in response to western pressure.  Big changes took place – then the policy shift occurred.  Meanwhile, the Castro Bros. and their status quo remains in full swing 90 miles south of the border.

    However, I do not believe that this foreign policy shift is unique to this administration.  In fact, there is a definitive and traceable pattern developing.  What we are seeing is transference of the (arguably) failed Middle East policy into Latin America.  I.E. if we play nice, give them a seat at the table, we will gain ground.  Whether you like the honey over vinegar approach or not, it has clearly not proven to be tenable currency in the world of Islamic extremism.   Perhaps it will work better in Cuba.  After all, a case can be made that this is similar to the model we followed with China as it erupted into the world economy a few decades ago. 

    The biggest change did not happen last week, but actually took place over the last decade.  The American people simply are not scared of Communism anymore.  With Islamic terrorists as public enemy number one, McCarthy has left the building without so much as a raised eyebrow.

    Like it or not, America is on track to spend at least the next two years attempting “restorative justice.”  I’m sure some of our other antagonists are watching the situation very closely.  Sadly, sometimes being the ‘bigger person’ just makes you a larger target.

The Crimean Trail of Tears

   An entire ethnicity uprooted and forced to march across hundreds of miles of rough terrain.  Possibly 46% of the total population dies along the way to their new “homeland.”  While this sounds like the United States’ relocation of the Native American nations in the 1830s, it is actually the story of the Crimean Tatars from the Crimean Peninsula as the USSR orchestrated its own Trail of Tears in 1944. 

   The buildup to deportation included a decades-long pattern of [Russian] government induced starvation of the regional population, but the final excuse for removal came after the Second World War.  The Tatars were collectively blamed for collaborating with Nazi Germany and relocated into camps and then dispersed to other Russian controlled territories to the east such as Uzbekistan for their alleged treason. 

   But the purge went beyond deportation.  A massive effort was made to completely erase them from the history of the region.[1]  Everything written or translated to their language was burnt and grave markers were destroyed.  Even Tatars who fought in the Russian army during WWII were deported upon their return home while others who had been captured as POWs by the Nazis rarely escaped work camps or execution at the hand of those who should have been their liberators.

   Be it their Islamic roots, their history of antagonism towards Russia and Europe over centuries of raiding and capturing slaves, or the Nazi collaboration of a few, Soviet leaders were happy to be rid of the entire population and quickly bequeathed the entire peninsula to their trusted Soviet Socialist member state: Ukraine in 1954. It would be over 30 years before significant efforts were made to bring this people group back to their homeland.  Today, the Crimean Tatars struggle to champion civil rights and the interests of their people in the region and to reestablish their history, brutally erased in the name of ethnic cleansing.    

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[1] Allen W. Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Hoover Press, 1978), page 172.