The arms race and peace
Chris Duthie-Jung
Almost every evening lately, the 6pm news carries another instalment of the unfolding barbarity of the so-called Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq. As abhorrent as we find it, they are in reality just the latest in a seeming non-stop march of military aggressors around the world. A myriad complex issues lie behind the warring of course; issues that can never justify, even for a moment, the untold suffering that results for the non-combatant local peoples – the children, the women and men who did not seek war but are all but consumed by it. A question occasionally asked, but which remains always relevant, is how do these forces arm themselves? It is a larger-scale version of the same question that haunts the US as it grapples with its own internal firearm laws – are the weapons needed to defend oneself or are they predominantly the reason why defence is felt to be necessary?
In their statement, A Consistent Ethic of Life, the New Zealand Bishops brought to bear Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s stinging criticism of a morality that blinds itself to the breadth of the issues involved in standing for life. In the case of arms and warfare, while we may find grounds in our theory of a ‘Just War’ to fight back in defence of the vulnerable, we are left confronted by the fact the fighting only happens on the scale we witness because we provide the means.
The development, production and sale of weapons are almost unbounded and for every dollar spent there is a dollar that cannot be spent to relieve the suffering of the poor – not to mention the suffering of the victims of the use of the weapons themselves! It is, say our Bishops, outright theft from those who have to go without.
But how to stop it? How to bring about a real and lasting peace? Justice must be at its heart; that much we know. Surely too, there must be an end to our impotent acceptance of profit making from the manufacture and sale of weapons to would-be-fighters, marketing on a scale that beggar
s belief. From hand guns to ballistic missiles, we know this is an utterly unethical use of the world’s financial and natural resources.
Can and will Christians, especially Catholics, rise to the challenge of denouncing the weapons market that is so blatantly anti-Gospel?
Dr Chris Duthie-Jung is Head of Partnerships and Director of NCRS for TCI.