Loving the Terrorists by David Diggs

by David Diggs

They say that we hear what we want to hear and believe what we want to believe. Perhaps that explains the strange deafness and disbelief of Jesus’ disciples. Over and over again Jesus told them that he would be delivered up, would suffer, and would die.

This made no sense to them, though. Jesus was, after all, the long-awaited Messiah. They had seen him calm the sea and raise the dead and were eagerly anticipating the day when he would use his power to bring the Roman Empire to its knees and claim his rightful place on the throne of David. They were already arguing among themselves over who would be given the highest rank in his kingdom.

You don’t have to be the Messiah to be misunderstood or disbelieved.

When an American elementary school teacher named Chris Low started working with a rural school in Haiti in 1996 she faced a great deal of disbelief.

People in the community had never seen a school where beatings weren’t routine and dismissed Chris’s decision not to beat her students as just another harebrained idea from an idealistic foreigner. The fact that she had been a successful teacher in one of the best school districts in the U.S. carried little weight with them. Maybe foreign kids didn’t need beating, but they were certain that Haitian kids couldn’t learn without the liberal use of the switch.

Perhaps the only exception to this view in the community was held by Abner Sauveur, the Haitian man who directed the school. During an exchange visit to the U.S. sponsored by Beyond Borders, he had seen classrooms that functioned well without corporal punishment. So, he not only allowed Chris to run her class without hitting her students, he also agreed to ban corporal punishment throughout the school.

The parents in the area were so opposed to the ban on beatings that the school had a hard time attracting students. It became known far and wide as “lekòl ki pa kale timoun”—“the school that doesn’t beat children.”

There were other difficulties, too. The Haitian teachers in the school had never been trained to manage their classes without violence. Simply telling them that they were no longer allowed to beat their students wasn’t enough. Their whole understanding of education would have to change, and they would have to develop a whole new set of teaching skills.

In traditional Haitian classrooms students sit and endlessly copy, chant, and memorize texts in French, a language that few Haitian students or even their teachers speak. Without the threat of beatings, how would teachers get their students to focus on such mind-numbing work?

The United States has just engaged in its second war since September 11. The stated goal in both conflicts was to make the world safer.

Millions marched against this latest war, though. They said that war is not the answer. Millions of others viewed these demonstrations with great skepticism and even anger, seeing the protesters as misguided, fanatical, and even dangerous. The protesters, some said, were aiding and abetting a tyrant, a man so vile that he gassed his own people.

When Saddam Hussein quickly fell from power and U.S. soldiers were welcomed as liberators by many in Iraq, many of those who supported the war felt vindicated.

It is hard to argue with success.

But how should we define success? Saddam is no longer in power, but will the world ultimately be safer because of this war?

Haitians in Chris’s community pointed to the success of beatings, how students who had difficulty focusing on their lessons suddenly became more studious the moment the well-worn stick appeared.

But short-term success can still be long-term failure.

If a teacher’s goal is simply to get students to focus on a particular lesson or to stop talking in class, then the threat of a beating works wonders. But if the goal is for students to become life-long learners and responsible citizens, then something else is needed. Students need a space free of fear to develop their own internal motivation to learn and to act responsibly. Otherwise they will be lost when someone isn’t standing over them with a stick.

We can rejoice that Saddam Hussein is no longer in control of Iraq and that Osama bin Laden is on the run. But if our goal is long-term peace in the world, it may take decades to judge the success of our most recent military actions. Short-term victories don’t always translate into long-term success.

Indeed, we can trace the roots of these two latest wars and the September 11 attacks to conflicts we had won two decades earlier.

In 1979 the United States still saw the Soviet Union as the biggest threat in the world. It was then that we began arming and training groups of Islamic fundamentalists who came to be known as the Mujahadeen. Our aim, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, was to “to induce a Soviet military intervention” in Afghanistan and give “the USSR its Vietnam war.” Our military assistance to the Mujahadeen continued throughout the Reagan presidency and became the largest and most expensive covert CIA operation in history.

The strategy succeeded brilliantly. The Soviets got completely bogged down, drained their treasury on the war, and suffered about 50,000 casualties. They withdrew in 1989 completely demoralized. Brzezinski and many others credit the war with hastening the fall of the Soviet Union.

But did we succeed in the larger sense? Did we create a safer more peaceful world? We certainly didn’t create a more peaceful Afghanistan. Some estimate that a million and a half Afghan civilians died in the conflict. The Afghan economy was left totally shattered. When the Soviets pulled out, we lost interest in Afghanistan, and together with the Soviets we left the country splintered by civil war, lawless, and hungry.

And what of our own peace and security? Even if we assume that our victory in the Cold War was hastened by our strategy in Afghanistan, we must also add one huge unintended consequence of our strategy there to the balance. Never during the entire Cold War had the Soviets attacked a target in the U.S. But what we experienced on September 11 can be traced largely to our strategy in Afghanistan. A leading member of the Mujahadeen was a man we had trained and armed and once praised as a freedom fighter, Osama bin Laden. And al-Queda grew out of structures we helped create in the effort to funnel funds and arms to the Mujahadeen.

Like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein also received military, technical, and financial support from the United States. His infatuation with chemical weapons probably got its start back in 1967 when he and other Iraqi officers were given a tour of the principal U.S. chemical weapons facilities. There he was shown the basic design of chemical weapons and witnessed their manufacture and deployment.

Shortly after his ruthless ascent to power in Iraq in 1979, the U.S. began supplying Saddam, directly and through our allies, with both conventional arms and with the materials and technical means for creating his own chemical and biological weapons. We continued to do so even after it was clear that he was using these “weapons of mass destruction” in his war with Iran and on his own people.

Donald Rumsfeld, our current Secretary of Defence, was sent in 1983 to Iraq by President Reagan to meet with Saddam. According to the Washington Post, “Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an ‘almost daily’ basis in defiance of international conventions.” Reagan officials turned a blind eye to these abuses because they considered it in America’s strategic interest to keep Iran and Iraq deadlocked in a war to prevent either side from gaining an upper hand in the region.

As the world eventually learned during the Iran-Contra scandal, the U.S. was also supplying Iraq’s enemy, Iran, with weapons (and illegally using the money generated by these arms to fund another covert military operation in Central America).

Despite this embarrassing discovery, the U.S. administration could argue that it had achieved its strategic goals. We had neutralized the threat that both Iran and Iraq posed to our interests in the region by keeping them fighting and helping them exhaust themselves in a war we kept either side from winning.

But what about the larger goal of long-term peace and security? Even if we can ignore the estimated one million Iranian and Iraqi soldiers who died in the conflict, we have to recognize that we helped facilitate Saddam amassing his chemical and biological weapons when we thought it served our interests. These same weapons we helped him develop were our central justification for going to war with Iraq.

We won the Cold War, but the corpse of the “Evil Empire” was hardly cold when the “Axis of Evil” rose up in its stead. It seems that we can stomp out one tyrant, but not without scattering the seeds of future tyrannies. And each time we stomp out a tyrant, multitudes of innocent people seem to perish, too.

Perhaps Martin Luther King was right when he said,

The past is prophetic in that it asserts that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. How much longer must we play at deadly war games before we heed the plaintive pleas of the unnumbered dead and maimed of past wars?

But is this a realistic possibility? Are there really peaceful alternatives that can provide us with the security we seek?

It will be impossible for us to know as long as we are investing hundreds of billions of dollars each year in building and maintaining the most lethal military machine in history. The temptation to use this machine whenever we get the chance will be irresistible as long as we devote so much of our money and energy to it.

Teachers in Chris’s school couldn’t develop ways of managing their classrooms non-violently as long as they kept a stick handy. Only when the stick was removed as an option were the teachers willing to make the effort to engage their students’ interests and harness their native curiosity to cooperatively build a learning environment. Teachers who had become skilled at using fear to motivate their students had to learn to create an atmosphere of trust and security where students were free to express themselves and participate in their own education.

The good news is that seven years have passed and this radically different way of educating children has taken root and is beginning to blossom. Wonder rather than fear motivates the students now. Parents visit the school and see that their children are actually better behaved in classrooms free of violence. Students are learning not only what they need to be able to perform well on the national exam, they are learning to think, to solve problems, to cooperate, to listen and read with understanding, and to speak and write clearly. Now, instead of teaching students to passively accept domination, this school is a liberating force that is creating young leaders for Haiti’s emerging democracy. Having seen the success of Matenwa's non-violent school, other schools in the region are beginning to ban beatings and seeking training in new approaches to teaching, too.

Like teaching without violence, non-violent peace making will require skill, dedication, imagination, and a new mentality. The challenge of developing these peaceful alternatives to war will not be technological or economic but moral. We can’t simply divert money from the military budget to hire contractors to make peace. This form of peacemaking may turn out to be virtually cost-free when compared to militarism. That may, in fact, turn out to be a real obstacle to change. Unlike the arms makers and their lobbyists who are embedded in our legislative process, no one will get rich by practicing peace.

Making peace will require us not only to lay aside our weapons but to give up our economic domination of the world, too. We will have to put aside both our Weapons of Mass Destruction and our Habits of Mass Consumption that make us so dependent not only on cheap imported oil, but on exploitative economic relationships with poor nations around the globe.

Maybe it is hopelessly naïve to think that active non-violence such as we saw in the Civil Rights Movement could ever be adapted for building peace between nations. Maybe it is too much to hope that powerful nations and world leaders will give up their addiction to weapons.

Even so, followers of Jesus are not relieved of his command to love their enemies. As Mother Theresa often said, “We are not called to be successful, but to be faithful.” We cannot both put our faith in God and continue to honor the idols of mammon and militarism.

To be faithful to Jesus requires a regime change of the heart. To follow Jesus is to follow One who possessed all power but made peace for us through utter weakness. We are not above our master. We too are called to be peacemakers not only by laying down our weapons but by laying down our very lives, even for our enemies.

The Good News is that God’s power is revealed in our weakness. Easter follows Good Friday. Resurrection follows crucifixion. God wins us in Christ through preemptive love. God calls and equips us to do the same in the world.

“Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.” (Col. 1:21-22)

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David Diggs is on staff with Beyond Borders, a ministry that promotes peace and justice by building understanding across economic and cultural lines. He served in Haiti for nearly ten years and lives now with his family in Washington, DC.

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