The Doctrine of Total War was Condemned by the Catholic Church

Several times over. Book after book advocating it was put on the Index.

[1) New blog on the kid : David P. Barash - an Enemy of Christianity and of Me, 2) The Doctrine of Total War was Condemned by the Catholic Church, 3) Correspondence de of Hans Georg Lundahl : David P. Barash thinks I might have been hasty judging him as an enemy]

I read one Israeli Parlamentarian (or is it Knessetarian there?) cite one dead member of her own faction in favour of seeing every Palestinian child as viper brood. That was the doctrine of total war - "Hamas are our enemies, so Palestinian children are our enemies." Not the literal words she said, but a summing up of one of the points.

I have seen the same doctrine for the other side too. Barash and Webel - not sure who Webel is - but Barash is the same as in previous article, were in 2007 cited in this passage:*

It is this mind-set that leads peace professors to accuse the U.S. of “state terrorism,” to call George W. Bush “the world’s worst terrorist,” and even to characterize those murdered in the Twin Towers as oppressors who, by working at investment banks and brokerage houses, were ultimately responsible for their own deaths. Barash and Webel, for instance, write sympathetically of “frustrated, impoverished, infuriated people . . . who view the United States as a terrorist country” and for whom “attacks on American civilians were justified” because one shouldn’t distinguish “between a ‘terrorist state’ and the citizens who aid and abet that state.”

I have for my own part stated a limited sympathy for that point of view. How so? Well, if a country is a democracy, then its citizens are supposed to be responsible for every major policy its government takes, according to the theory of democracy.

Of course, carried to an end point, this logic makes every citizen of a democracy somehow offending a legitimate target of the offended.

Some have taken too literally the brags of US and of Israel to be democracies, and so they see every US Citizen as a culprit for any of the policies US took (and some were bad), and they also see every Israeli (except those going out of their way to make peace gestures) as responsible for whatever has been done to Palestinians (and some of that was bad).

In reality, there is an amount of Oligarchy, and the more complex an issue is (like foreign policy being more likely to be beyond a common citizen than the parts of government touching his affairs), the larger it is.

One can take Twin Towers as an example of Global Capitalism, and some of that is bad.

I have said, the target per se (as distinct from the collateral targets like cleaning ladies in Twin Towers) in Sept 11 atatck was more of a culprit and also less sacrosanct in the manner of statesmanship than the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand. I have from that concluded, either US had no right to start a war for Twin Towers (wait a moment before you conclude this means more than it does) or it owes an excuse to Austria's since Woodrow Wilson (who launched Trotski onto Russia, as Prussia did with Lenin) made Austrian representatives sign a guilt of war clause, owing to their ultimatum to Serbia.

However, I have also said, US had a licit cause other than Twin Towers for war against the Taliban régime. A month or so before Twin Towers, there were 16 Christians in Afghanistan. 8 of them were NGO-workers, they were declared insane and sent back to the West. Bush did not protest, as far as I know, against this demeaning of the Christian name. The other 8 were citizens of Afghanistan. As far as news stories went back then, they were not heard of. That is when Bush had had a right to launch a Crusade. Had he done so, he might have avoided Twin Towers. But even so, I think he had a right to, after starting a war for a wrong reason, continue it for the right one, the protection of Christians.

Understanding that a literal concept of democracy can, separated from Christian charity, lead to a doctrine of Total War (indluding therefore Terrorism, acts of violence of otherwise non-involved civilians) is not the same as endorsing it.

What St Thomas said is rather "one cannot take revenge on a multitude" - this is a concept which I think Christianity brought into the world.** Once a rebellion is quenched, not everyone who supported it, but only instigators can be punished by the legitimate authority targetted by the rebellion (that is one reason why Robespierre and Danton were not legitimate authority as regards Bretagne or Vendée, nor the Choans rebels : the French Republic answered with genocidal acts, with massacres).

Hans Georg Lundal
Nanterre UL
Motherhood of Our Lady
the Blessed Virgin Mary
11-X-2014

* City Journal : The Peace Racket : Bruce Bawer, Summer 2007
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_3_peace_racket.html

** Julius Caesar also proned this mildness, in a limited way : when the multitude in question was one of Roman Citizens or Auxiliarii, who had fought on the other side of the Civil War.