The Curse of Standing Armies
by
Laurence
M. Vance
Recently
by Laurence M. Vance: My
Antiwar Odyssey
Review of
Joel McDurmon, The
Bible War in America: A Biblical View of an American Obsession
and Steps to Recover Liberty (America Vision, 2012), vii
+ 107 pgs., paperback, $12.95.
Joel McDurmon
is Director of Research at American
Vision, not to be confused with Vision
America. He is also a lecturer, a preacher, and the author of
a powerful little new book, The Bible War in America:
A Biblical View of an American Obsession and Steps to Recover Liberty
(hereafter The Bible War in America).
McDurmon is
also the author of Restoring America One County at a Time,
God
Versus Socialism, and several other books. He explains in
his preface that The Bible War in America is an expanded
version of a chapter from his larger book Restoring America One
County at a Time.
Although the
book is not about standing armies per se, if there is one theme
that resonates throughout this book, it is the curse of standing
armies:
No tyranny
can rule without military force, and when a central government
has access to a standing army, then not even long traditions,
faith, or well-entrenched legal systems can constrain a tyrant’s
whim.A standing
army is a perpetual temptation for a king to impose his will by
force somewhere, if not abroad in imperial conquest, then
in tyranny upon the people at home – or both.
But McDurmon
doesn’t stop there: “The lust for a standing army transforms
the entire character of a nation from liberty to centralized nanny-state.”
The welfare and warfare states are “evil twins, constantly
feeding and empowering the other.” They are “one and the
same, fueled by the same lusts, toward the same ends, by the same
spirit.”
Because he
writes from a Christian perspective, McDurmon is distressed that
“many Christians uncritically praise every advance of American
ship and jet, hailing every missile strike with strains of ‘God
Bless America.’” Thus, he emphasizes that if
American
Christians, especially fundamentalists and evangelicals, are serious
about the Bible and biblical freedom, they have got to end their
love affair with America’s standing army. It is unbiblical; it
is outrageously, unbiblically expensive; and it is invasive, destructive,
and deadly, most often not in pure defense.
The Bible
War in America is in three parts. Part 1 presents the
biblical teaching on war and the military. The author finds it so
“contrary to what we have know and come to accept as normal,
that were it not God’s Own Word, many Americans would refuse even
to tolerate hearing it for a second.” Part 2, which takes up
a majority of the book, is a survey of American history as it relates
to the rise of a standing army, the destruction of the Militia,
the centralization of state power during wartime, and the establishment
of the Total State. Part 3 provides practical steps that individuals
can take to restore the freedoms they once had in the areas of war
and the military.
In part 1,
McDurmon focuses mainly on two passages of Scripture from the Book
of Deuteronomy.
Based on the
laws for kings in Deuteronomy 17, and especially the prohibition
against multiplying horses (Deut. 17:16), McDurmon concludes that
a king is forbidden offensive armies, standing armies, imperialism,
conscription, foreign alliances, and a large public treasury.
Based on the
laws for warfare in Deuteronomy 20, McDurmon concludes that war
and bloodshed are acceptable only in defense, only after terms of
peace are offered, and only as a last resort. Crops, water sources
and systems, livestock, beehives, other sources of food and health,
medical centers, pharmaceutical plants, factories (if not used for
war efforts), and businesses should be preserved during times of
war.
McDurmon says
that although we are a long way from these ideals today, that has
not always been the case. He discusses the aversion to standing
armies of the anti-federalists and their suspicion of the military
clauses in the new Constitution. And “while the colonies certainly
did not develop a fully biblical view of the military and war, they
were far closer to one than America is today.” The American
colonists “followed the biblical principle of making war a
last resort.”
Later in the
book, McDurmon refers back to these ideals as biblical principles,
a biblical model, the biblical standard of a free society, biblical
freedom, and biblical standards of freedom, as well as implying
that they are universal laws for kings and laws for war. The extent
to which these can be taken as such gets into a serious discussion
of hermeneutics that is way beyond the scope of this review. And
the same goes for the author’s statements about a civil society
“restricted by God’s law” with “civil justice according
to God’s law,” although I may be reading too much into them.
But at least, unlike proponents of just war theory, McDurmon actually
grounds his views in Scripture.
The best part
of this short book is actually not in the expressly biblical part
1, but in the more historical part 2.
McDurmon sees
the first truly world war as the Seven Years War, known in America
as the French and Indian War. He faults George Washington for “ambling
into the frontier seeking glory as a military agent for the British
public-private partnership, the Ohio company.”
McDurmon provides
an interesting and informative account of Shays’ Rebellion and the
Whiskey Rebellion. He assails the two Militia Acts of 1792. He sees
Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and violations
of civil liberties as built on “the extra powers created by
Hamilton and Washington in that old Militia Act of 1792.”
McDurmon maintains
that “virtually every one of the biblical principles of war”
was completely trampled from “Washington’s appearance on the
scene of American history” until just the beginning of the
Civil War. He views “the most important military sin”
of that misnamed conflict to be “Sherman’s and Sheridan’s doctrine
and practices of scorched earth and total war.” These generals’
“constant activism to increase the powers of the central standing
army, to abolish the local militia system, and their eagerness to
employ the national army in more creative ways stateside” are
“neglected pieces of history.”
One creative
way the Army was employed was to exterminate the Indians. McDurmon
quotes Sherman’s Hitleresque remark on the “pacification”
of the Indians as “the final solution of the Indian problem.”
As Sherman wrote to Grant: “During an assault, the soldiers
cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate
as to age.”
After discussing
the U.S. subjugation of Hawaii and the barbarism of U.S. troops
in the Philippines after Spanish-American War, McDurmon discusses
the “final metamorphoses of the American military into a full
standing army largely at the behest of an imperialistic corporate-federal
state” in his analysis of the Militia Acts of 1903 and 1908
and the National Defense Act of 1916. The Army went from “something
closer to a biblical model” to “the epitome of a centralized
warfare State, empire-ready, standing army, funded by a large general
treasury.”
McDurmon quotes
Martin van Creveld to reinforce his statement that war has perennially
“been the greatest centralizing mechanism to achieve the Total
State.” He cites Robert Nisbet on how “Americans came
to accept the centralized power despite the social damage, loss
of freedom, and destruction of the love of neighbor.” The author
views the Welfare State as “the direct result of War and of
the lasting social effects of War.” Indeed, “Wilson’s
temporary War State became FDR’s Welfare State.” I was not
aware of this powerful statement McDurmon quotes from Alexis de
Tocqueville: “All men of military genius are fond of centralization,
which increases their strength; and all men of centralizing genius
are fond of war, which compels nations to combine all their powers
in the hands of the government.”
McDurmon closes
part 2 with his modern take on Sun Tzu’s dictum that all warfare
is based on deception:
Governments,
you see, must continually lie to prosecute war: deceive the enemy
for advantage, yes; but also lie to its own people about the need
for war in the first place. They will life about the cost of the
war, the bloodiness of the war, the long-term plans for war, and
the extent of war.
In part 3 McDurmon
offers some practical steps to liberty:
- Don’t join
the current standing armed forces. - Don’t support
political candidates who have militaristic or imperial agendas. - If you own
a business, don’t contract with the military unless you are absolutely
sure the military is not using the technology, products, or services
you provide for the purposes of unjust wars. - For consumers,
try as much as possible to avoid patronizing companies that contribute
to such wars.
And for American
Christians in particular:
We have to
stop applauding everything the military does as if it were automatically
the gleam of national greatness, quit praising all soldiers all
the time as sacrosanct individuals, and quit forbidding any criticism
of the military as if it were the holy of holies.
I was glad
to see McDurmon do something that I have done on several occasions:
point out the hypocrisy of pro-war pro-lifers:
The sad fact
is, too many Christians who decry the government-protected slaughter
of children in the womb are way too tolerant of government-mandated
slaughter of kids at nineteen or twenty, not to mention the slaughter
of thousands of civilian bystanders. A consistent pro-life view
will avoid this terrible oversight.
I was not glad,
however, to see McDurmon venture into a brief discussion of Bible
prophecy and people clinging “to military might because of
their view of Israel and the end times.” He characterizes the
teaching of dispensationalism and premillennialism (without mentioning
them by name) as “an enormous theological delusion that leads
so many to continue promoting an unbiblical view of war and the
military, especially in regard to having a strong threatening presence
in the Middle East.” This approach is to be expected since
the author is a Reformed Christian, but as a premillennial dispensationalist
I beg to differ.
There is much
packed into this small book. The theological quibbles I have with
the author will probably not be shared by the majority of readers.
I highly recommend The Bible War in America to Christians
(and others) of all theological persuasions.
August
27, 2012
Laurence
M. Vance [send him mail]
writes from central Florida. He is the author of Christianity
and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State, The
Revolution that Wasn’t, and Rethinking
the Good War. His latest book is The
Quatercentenary of the King James Bible. Visit his
website.
Copyright
© 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.