“Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed.”
Jesus understands the killer ethics of the dictator class. They will kill him and will command subordinate soldier/slaves to do the deed. An extremely small number of very unhealthy individuals could ever, on their own, kill another human being. People who kill usually explain they were commanded to, by God or by a God-like ranked authority. The religion of Militarism is the ethics of god-like dictators, in which ranked officers train subordinate soldier/slaves to kill. They do so via the military or via the religion of Militarism’s overall influence in a culture. It is a culture that normalizes the extreme unhealthiness of killing because they wage war on a person’s conscience and, in turn, on democracy. Waging war on a person’s conscience can be seen in studies with veterans. For example, during World War II, General S.L.A. Marshall questioned hundreds of men after combat experiences. In 1947, he published his findings in Men Against Fire. Marshall “found that fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual.” Marshall went on: “It is therefore reasonable to believe that the average and normally healthy individual … has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life.” Marshall accepted that each person is, by nature, “a conscientious objector.” The conscientious decision to respect life is so fundamental that studies showed that before and during “World War II, 75 to 80 percent of riflemen did not fire their weapons at an exposed enemy even to save their lives and the lives of their friends.” General Marshall advised conscientious objection “needs to be analyzed and understood if we are to prevail against it in the interests of battle efficiency.” The burgeoning U.S. Empire took Marshall’s advice. The military developed trainings that resulted in more recruits violating their conscientious objection to killing. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in On Killing notes that “since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare… conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one’s own troops.” “Psychological conditioning was applied en masse to a body of soldiers” who were successful in killing more people. Fire and kill rates increased; to “55 percent” in Korea, and ”90 to 95 percent” in “Vietnam. Civilian deaths in war also increased. Increased too were the numbers of surviving soldiers committing suicide, confirmed with U. S. veterans commanded to kill Afghanis and Iraqis. A soldier is reduced to a dehumanized agent state by conditioning him to be desensitized to his own conscience and kill in violation of it. He does so because he is sensitized to the orders of a ranked superior commanding him to kill. It is the experience of the soldiers commanded to kill Jesus and all soldiers commanded to kill throughout history. It is the current experience of white Biblical Nationalists being commanded to kill enemy liberals and socialists in the U.S. civil war they are fighting.
The religion of Militarism by which the U.S. Empire operates can only operate as a dictatorship. It cannot and does not operate as a democracy, though it can be converted by dissolving Militarism. Liberal reformers are currently warning of the loss of democracy as if it is experienced every four years in a presidential election. Democracy is based in conscience which liberals too put in peril, every day. Liberals are among this era’s “elders, chief priests, and scribes.” They too diminish the conscience of soldiers and normalize the extreme unhealthiness of killing by the hero status they give soldiers, every day. The MAGA cult is simply more pronounced in having ranked rulers like Donald Trump and his white supremacist cohorts glorify being a soldier / police and glorify the extreme unhealthiness of killing. It is a mistake to think MAGA Biblical Nationalists are swayed by shouts of democracy in peril. Biblical Nationalists do not want a democracy. They want a dictatorship. MAGA dictators, like all dictators, perennially wage war on democracy because they perennially wage war on conscience.
Prayer: Beautiful Spirit, be my guide in conscientious living.
Question: Biblical Nationalists do not want a democracy. Do I?
September 03, 2023 Gospel Matthew 16: 21-27 Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time