MY COUNTRY STILL ? ROUGH DRAFT – The Rev. Robert Eddy

ROUGH DRAFT

MY COUNTRY STILL ???
Based on a sermon delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola, FL 7 July 2014
INTRODUCTION TO THE SONG, “THIS IS MY COUNTRY”

Good Morning,Welcome to an hour of Skeptical Nostalgia. If you’re here for the first time a very special WELCOME. You’ll have a chance to introduce yourself a bit later. Me? I’m the Rev. Bob Eddy I was privileged to be THE minister of this congregation for most of the months from September 1999 through June 2005. Our current minister, Rev. Julie Kaine who is spending time with her family this fourth of July weekend asked me to speak today and I chose the topic, “Is This Still My Country?” My answer is YES, but . To quote a famous toast, “My Country, May she always be right, but right or wrong MY country.”

Soon after I turned 10, in September of 1940, The song “This Is My Country” was at the top of the hit parade. SHOW SLIDE. I thought we could open with it this morning. But I find I cannot sing the original words. We UU’s have that problem a lot – so I have altered the words somewhat and ask you to join me singing this altered version:
(SHOW SLIDE)

We’ll recite the verse:

INTRODUCTION TO THE SONG “GOD BLESS AMERICA”
What you have just seen is an example of “psudo-history” Remember that word. Psudohistory. I’ll be using it a lot later.
Is there anyone here who has not heard the song, “God Bless America?” Did you know that it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s official theme song when he ran for an unprecedented third term as president of the United States in 1940? I didn’t until I checked it out on line. Perhaps you remember that on September 11, 2001, “following [speeches] on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. by then House and Senate leaders Dennis Hasert and Tom Dasche, members of the United States Congress broke out into an apparently spontaneous singing of … “God Bless America” ” A powerful song indeed and one we can sing unreservedly – however we define the word God.

MESSAGE

As so often happens when I’m preparing to write a sermon, someone comes up with a statement that summarizes my point better then I could. Last week Andrew Bacevich, professor of history at Boston, University was interviewed by Bill Moyers. Here’s Moyer’s introduction.
“Andrew J. Bacevich was born 1947 in Normal, Illinois, the son of two WWII veterans. He graduated from West Point in 1969 and served in Vietnam from the summer of 1970 to the summer of 1971. He continued in a military career that ended in the early 1990s, and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. Bacevich received his Ph.D. from Princeton, taught at the U.S. Military Academy and Johns Hopkins before joining the faculty of Boston University, where he is now professor of history and international relations”. Bacevich is author of numerous books and considers himself a conservative.

Far better credentials than Bob Eddy. Here’s what Bacevich wrote.

“The belief in American exceptional-ism is accompanied by a specific historical narrative: a story of contemporary history to which we swear fealty or give our allegiance and that’s the story that is centered on World War 2. and centered on a very specific interpretation of world war 2, as a fight of good against evil in which the United States liberated western Europe and overthrew Nazi Germany. Now that story’s not wrong . It’s just radically incomplete. The preoccupation with world war two, particularly the European war makes it possible to gloss over much of what followed World War two, during the cold war … episodes like overthrowing governments we didn’t like , befriending autocrats and corrupt dictators around the world, making monumental mistakes like the Vietnam war.”
So says Dr. Bacevich. And so say I.
_
When Rev. Julie asked me to speak on this Fourth of July weekend, I thought I would simply review a 2005 book from which she quoted several weeks ago. The title?: “Honest Patriots: Loving Your country enough to Remember It’s Misdeeds.” by the Rev. Doctor Donald Shrive, Dean of Union Theological Seminary. Dr. Shrive devotes two chapters out of only five, to the misdeeds of Germany and the Union of South Africa and how each dealt and deals with what most of it’s current citizens now consider horrible misdeeds: the Genocide of Jews by Germany and the virtual enslavement of the indigenous population by the Union of South Africa. Shrive then turns to two chapters on two of America’s misdeeds: the first: kidnaping and enslaving Africans and their offspring and secondly the deliberate Genocide (my term not his) of North America’s indigenous population. Two cases that many, if not most Americans would today also view as “misdeeds.”

What I want to suggest this morning is that there is another misdeed; one which few Americans would consider a misdeed: the use of “carpet bombing” in World War Two, culminating in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.

The definitive book on that subject is by a British educator A.C. Grayling. The book? Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan.”

Here is the review from publisher’s weekly.
“The Allied bombing of Axis cities, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and made smoking ruins of Dresden, Tokyo and Hiroshima, remains one of the great controversies of WWII; this probing study does the issue full justice. Philosophy professor Grayling (The Meaning of Things) focuses on Britain’s “area bombing” of entire German cities, a strategy adopted initially because bombers couldn’t hit smaller sites and then, as attitudes hardened, continued as a deliberate attack on civilian morale. Grayling scrupulously considers the justifications for area bombing—that it would shorten the conflict by destroying Germany’s economy and will to resist, that civilian workers were also combatants or that it was simply the rough justice of war—and finds them [the justifications] wanting. British bombing, he contends, did little damage to the German war effort at an unconscionable price in innocent lives, in contrast to American pinpoint bombing of industrial and military targets, which succeeded in paralyzing the German economy with few civilian casualties. (The Americans, he sadly notes, resorted to area bombing in their devastating air campaign against Japan.) Drawing on firsthand accounts by theorists, architects, victims and opponents of area bombing, Grayling situates a lucid analysis of the historical data within a rigorous philosophical framework. (Mar.)
© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
All rights reserved.
–This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
END OF QUOTE:

This is not an easy book. There are no wasted words.

Grayling is no pacifist. He believes that WW 2 was a just war but that his government, the British Government under Winston Churchill, made an immoral and illegal choice to use “carpet bombing” to terrorize the German people into unconditional surrender. As Americans we can take some pride that – officially at least – our Army Air Force rejected “carpet bombing” in Europe. Supposedly we bombed only military targets. Any civilian casualties were considered unavoidable “collateral damage”. But our restraint in Europe makes it all the more distressing that we changed our position and resorted, as soon as we had the means, to carpet bombing Japanese cities.
Lets examine more closely what “carpet bombing” actually involved.

Have you ever heard the term, “Operation Gomorrah? It was the most “successful” of the area bombing raids the British conducted to hat date because it resulted in a “firestorm” like the later one that destroyed Dresden in Februay 13, 1945, the event made famous by Kurt Vonnegut’s Novel, “Slaughterhouse Five”

Grayling writes”
“…during the night of 27-8 July, [1943] Hamburg’s fire-fighters were overwhelmed by the torrents of incendiaries that fell on to the city, so many that they initiated a terrifying phenomenon: a fire storm. Fires in different streets progressively joined together, forming into vast pyres of flame that rapidly grew hotter and eventually roared upwards to a height of 7,000 feet … The glass windows of tramcars melted, bags of sugar boiled, people trying to flee the oven-like heat of air-raid shelters sank, petrified into grotesque gestures, into the boiling asphalt of the streets.”

This was repeated the next two nights.

In an appendix, Grayling lists the results for each bombing raid for which he was able to obtain records with the number killed and the number bombed out. On that night of July 27-28 in Hamburg, 35,000 were killed and 800,000 “bombed out” On the next night 1,000 were killed and 150,000 bombed out and on the third night there are no figures available perhaps because by then there were few officials left to count the dead and “bombed out.”

The bombing of Hamburg was just the first of the carpet bombings to produce a firestorm. A month earlier in Cologne in June 28-29,1943, 377 died and 230,000 were bombed out. Gradually the British Bombing Force increased it’s lethality. In Munich in three nights in July of 1944 1,471 died and 200,000 were bombed out. Hundreds of cities obliterated. And so it continued until Germany’s unconditional surrender,May 7, 1944 .

After the war, the leaders of Germany were put on trial by the victorious allies. Among the crimes for which they were tried was “violations of the laws or customs of war. They list several ending with “wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.” [[p 232]] On the next page Grayling states, “If the Allies were put on trial by the lights of their own Nuremberg Charter, how would they fare?” He concludes the allies would be condemned if such a trial ever took place.

As Andrew Bacevich told Bill Moyers last month, a rich psudo-history has grown up around that “last good war.” For example that the U.S. didn’t join the war against Germany until December 8, 1941. In fact, on March 11, 1941 the United States entered the war against Germany which had already overrun much of Europe.

I hope you had time before the service to read the Chronology I included in your Order of Service. Don’t read it now! It’s for later:

Why do I say that the United States entered the war against Germany on March 11, 1941? Because that is the day the president signed the Lend Lease Act. Many Americans felt we were woefully late in supporting the powers allied with Britain – others felt we had no business getting involved in yet another foreign war.

In January 1941, President Roosevelt delivered his annual “State of the Nation” speech to the congress. It has become known as the FOUR FREEDOM’S SPEECH because of these rousing words:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/ffaudioclip.mp3
These four freedoms were the goals the President laid out and which were later reframed in the Atlantic Charter after Germany declaired war on the United States. This is still the basic foreign policy of the United States. It is a crusade: the forces of light against the forces of darkness. Eisenhower used the term –crusade long before George W. Bush did. It is still the underlying goal – to bring those four freedoms to all peoples anywhere – by any means necessary. How are we doing?

Some will say that the whole scenario is a fraud. They say that the US is no different than the previous Empire builders who seek to maintain their privileges and power by any means necessary. That’s just what nations do. We’re no different. But I say there is a difference and that difference is that we are, to use Lincolns formulation, “ a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln felt the war to save the union was a struggle to determine whether “that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, [could] long endure.” That nation did endure at a terrible cost which could only be justified by the liberation of the enslaved descendents of Africans. What justification can we use for our part – I repeat our PART – in the slaughter of millions in the wars since 1865 and especially in the wars of the last century: 1914 to 2014.

Lincoln saw the civil war as divine punishment for America’s sin of enslavement. He said in his second inaugural address, when it seemed clear the war would soon end.

“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.[8]”

I do not share Lincoln’s theology. I believe that wars are not the expression of some divine plan. They are the fruits of human folly. They flow from the parts of human nature that we share with the Chimpansees and Baboons. War enlists the best of our natures in the service of the worst. Love of our comrades in arms becomes justification for killing whatever threatens them. Love of country sanctifies carpet bombing. You don’t have to be a pacifist to see that war is not the answer; it is the problem! I
I can become morose contemplating the endless history – reals and psudo – of wars – but I become hopeful when I see that more and more persons and nation abdure, reject and condemn carpet bombing or anything approaching it. I do not like the the president of the united states or his delegated officers engaging in assassinations but I must confess it is better than “bombing them back to the stone age.” And I do believe that the least known and funded department of my Government “The Department of Peace” which researches and promotes nonviolen – or at least less violent – means of resolving conflict – I do believe that eventually that Department will eventually become more powerful than the misnamed Department of Defense, once more honestly called the War Department. I do believe we should, in Lincoln’s words,
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.[8]”

Please join me in a time of quiet meditation.