War Will Not End If You Want It

My interest in comic books and heroes began with the campy 1960’s Batman TV show.  But it turned serious when I discovered the late 60’s Captain America comics.  The first full story when Cap was spun off into his own title covered several issues and found Cap battling a series of ever more menacing Nazi sleeper robots.  The trail eventually lead to The Red Skull who, despite the passage of more than 20 years, still sought to retake the world under the Nazi flag.  WWII veteran Jack Kirby produced those amazing pieces of graphic art, and I think the stories carried such a gut impact because of Kirby’ wartime service and the fact that he was Jewish – not to mention him being one of the most influential comic book artists ever.  I learned, at a very tender age, that some enemies cannot be defeated, they can only be contained.

It is easy these days to think of those stories as somehow “quaint” – childish stories told to children by grown men that could never quite leave the war behind. Yet I cannot help but wonder if just such a notion accounts for our world today.  Sure the rallies at Nuremberg are no more.  Swastikas are less tolerated in public than pornography.  But the real enemy, a desire to conquer the world steeped in antisemitic rhetoric, is all too real.  American politics are currently littered with candidates and office holders publicly declaring a barely disguised antisemitism.  France is aflame with “student protests,” yet Israel is preparing for a massive immigration influx from that nation because it is not safe for Jews to be on the streets in France.  One has to question if the protests really are about classroom conditions or if they are about something a bit more sinister.

And it is the anniversary of the October 7 attacks on Israel – attacks that bear a remarkable resemblance to the sleeper robot attacks that Cap battled 60 years ago – brutal, highly destructive, out of nowhere.  The three year anniversary of those attacks comes just weeks after the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks in this nation that were disturbingly treated as all-too-quaint by some in American politics.

We may have defeated Nazi Germany, but we did not defeat the impulses, ideas and sentiments that drove it to the brink of world domination and to attempting the genocide of the Jewish people.  Those ideas, impulses and sentiments now hide behind different flags and employ different strategies, but they just keep trying, ofttimes subversively, but in recent years all too overtly.  The war is not over just because we want it to be.  Too many people these days think it is and they do so at our peril.

As 9-11 and Oct 7 have illustrated, there is much we must do to protect ourselves from this enemy that will not stop; that will not die.  But our military, border security and law enforcement people cannot do that in a vacuum.  Any serious reading into WWII reveals that our entire nation fought that war, just not all on the front lines.  The largest companies in the nation turned their industrial capacity to war efforts.  Reading General Grove’s Manhattan Project memoir is disappointing in some aspects.  His role in constructing the amazing infrastructure to produce The Bomb, particularly in the production of the nuclear fuels for the bombs, consisted largely of letting contracts to some of those large corporation.  From his perspective, once the contract was let, the story ends.  If we are to keep the genuine enemy – those impulses, ideas and sentiments – at bay, we all have to be engaged.  We cannot merely leave it to “the pros.”

Defeating impulses, ideas and sentiments is; however, an entirely different proposition.  That cannot be accomplished with guns, bombs or borders.  I am not sure it can be done at all until Christ returns, but that does not mean I am not going to try.  Such efforts need to aim not at the human body but at the human soul.  It is not a job for government, it is a job for the church.  The persistence of those impulses, ideas and sentiments is testament to the church’s failings.  I pray for a church that can become tireless in its efforts to overcome those failings.