The most moral, wise, pure members of our society are those who stand against all wars and condemn every use of force by the malicious American government, including bloodthirsty President Obama, all while saying nothing about mass murder abroad, except maybe to downplay the crimes of terrorists and violent authoritarian regimes.  They are the true virtuous, the real Christians.  Just ask them.

You know these folks.  They are the ones that go to Afghanistan to convince little girls they should oppose the war against the Taliban and write stories with cherry-picked sources to argue that this is really what the people over there want.  Why not?  These peace-loving heroes won’t be getting acid or a bullet to the face when they return to the suburbs and the absolute security of their homes, like girls living under Taliban rule that want to go to school might.

These are the ones with status updates urging you to pray for al Qaeda terrorists, but never, not once, the victims of terrorism—those killed, their devastated families, or the communities that live in fear.  They can stroll casually to their local parish, so who cares if a Shiite family is blown up by Wahhabist terrorists outside of their mosque?

When tragedy struck on Monday in Boston, many took to social media to urge us to turn our attention to the real victims of the day: the innocent civilians killed by the US government in Afghanistan at a wedding that day.  Small caveat, the article they were circulating was an undated version of a story from 2002. But I guess that’s immaterial when you’re trying to trick regular folks into feeling guilty so they will unknowingly assist your anti-interventionist crusade, using the good will of people who care about all life and feel empathy toward all victims of violence as instruments for spreading propaganda.  It is not surprising that they ignored the violence in Syria or Iraq that took place on Monday, as these do not perfectly fit their narrative and provide a black-and-white display of the evil of American interventionism.  God forbid we pay attention to the children murdered by their government in Syria.

They are the ones who praise peace—including the peace of the slave and grave.  They call proponents of the responsibility to protect (R2P) war-mongering hawks, while offering nothing, not even a silly, unrealistic plan to stop mass murder, whether in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, or Syria.  You see, you might not know this, but these situations are complicated.  That’s their answer to what can be done and the end of their contribution while tens or hundreds of thousands are murdered by their own vicious governments.

They explain things like “Saddam Hussein is not that bad—he’s no Hitler.”  How many mass graves does it take to be more than kinda bad?  How many times do you need to engage in ethnic cleansing?   How many suicide bombers do you need to fund?  How many newborn children do you need to have executed in front of their (democratic activist) mothers?  How many religious leaders do you need to assassinate?  How many of your own people do you need to let starve to build more palaces?

And when it came time to offer an alternative to war for preventing the Baathist regime from violating numerous UN resolutions and the terms of peace from the Persian Gulf War, they offered cheap slogans and theatrics instead of alternatives.  The Bush administration deserve the lion’s share of the blame for the stunning number of failures in Iraq, starting with the way the war was sold to the public, and those who put their trust in that obscenely incompetent administration can’t help but feel guilt, but those who offered no legitimate alternative except to drop sanctions and allow Saddam Hussein to have a nuclear bomb (almost certainly producing the nuclearization of the entire region) also failed spectacularly.

There are pacifists and advocates of nonviolent resistance who I deeply admire, even though (in all honesty) I might consider their ideas impractical and even dangerously naïve in some circumstances (and they often return the favor, thinking I’m naïve when it comes to the efficacy of force and that the policies I favor are reckless, even if my intentions are good).  They are looking ahead to the Kingdom of God—not  the one that has broken into this world with Christ’s living promise, where sin continues to thwart the quest for communion and real peace, but the future Kingdom, fully established, where all are united in love.  Their hearts are in the right place, and they are honest, open, and true to their convictions.  They don’t hide their pacifism behind ridiculous practical arguments while claiming they support just war theory, but state their belief that Christians, even governments, must reject the concept of the just use of force and fully embrace nonviolence, regardless of the consequences.  They still search for ways to bring justice and real peace short of the use of force, and these legitimate efforts to find nonviolent solutions deserve much praise.  I suspect that numerous Millennial writers and readers share this approach or are quite sympathetic to it.

But if there are chicken hawks, who are willing to send others off to die in poorly planned wars that needlessly steal the lives of soldiers and the innocent, there are also chicken doves (if not chickendoves) whose smug complacency and obsession with their own supposed purity would kill far more if not for the fact that no one trusts them enough to give them positions of power.

There is no peace without justice.  To call civil war or genocide or violent tyranny peace because the United States has not intervened is to debase the word and ignore the Christian imperative to be peacemakers.  Their pride is not their only sin.