There Are No Civilians In This War
(Christian Gallery News Service, August 9, 2012) A multi-part documentary on Public Broadcasting System about the Second World War is called, aptly enough, "The War".
While the documentary is, as is usual with PBS productions, very helpful in seeing the general impact the Second World War had on life in the various parts of the United States, I was struck by one particular event spotlighted in the documentary.
As the Allied bombing campaigns in Germany began to coordinate all the massive resources created by the Allies, all of which depended primarily on United States Industrial output, those bombing campaigns began to result in large numbers of civilian casualties in Germany. The names of German cities leveled and set aflame are legendary to those who have studied the Second World War, with Dresden a representative icon of several German cities that produced massive numbers of civilian casualties as the cities were firebombed into leveled oblivion of Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah proportions.
In response to the specter of horror glimpsed by American and Allied pilots and other active witnesses of the destruction--the horror of the incineration of untold thousands of civilians on a daily or nightly basis--questions were raised even as the bombing campaigns continued, questions that were raised by men being overwhelmed by the duty to fight the war, yet somehow retain a basic human concern for non-combatants, for civilians, in the process of fighting the Second World War.
In response to the questions raised, the government of the United States issued a pamphlet to its fighting men, a pamphlet that had wide dissemination at the time.
The documentary had been droning on for a couple of hours, and I was not really focused on the television set, when I heard a sentence in the official pamphlet released by the government of the United States of America in the Second World War, a sentence that jerked me into rapt attention to the documentary. The sentence in the pamphlet was this: "There are no civilians."
And in that sentence, the government of the United States of America issued its official policy on the carpet firebombing of German cities: "There are no civilians."
That sentence was a harbinger for not only Dresden and the other incinerated cities of Europe, the sentence was a harbinger of Tokyo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, names that have the power today--or should have--to chill the bones of every person on earth who considers themselves to be a civilian in the present War On Terror.
So what's my point?
If you think, as I do, that what is known by news commentators of today as the War On Terror is actually a War created by the secular governments of this world who have risen up in War against the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, then the idea that there are no civilians reminds us that before the flood described in the Holy Bible, God Himself apparently decided that with the exception of Noah and his family--eight people--there are no civilians in a War Against God.
Following this insight, I realized that when God turns a nation at War against Him over to its sins--as we are told in Romans 1 God does to all those who refuse to honor God as God--then the growing number of "random" shootings of civilians across the United States of America and the world should remind us all that, as the government of the United States of America told its fighting men in the Second World War, "There are no civilians."
After all, we reap what we sow because the One, True God is, as is pictured at the header of this essay, and as we are told in Holy Writ, "A consuming fire."
When Christians Become Immune To Murder shows part of the trap American Christians have fallen into.
This Kindle E-book entitled HOW TO BE A MAN IN THE WAR AGAINST WOMEN fills in the details that nobody else is willng to talk about, at least not in September, 2112.