Not a Pretty Sight

Totalitarianism, Bellicosity, and the West

Totalitarian political systems are on a constant war footing--against their own citizens.  Once totalitarian control has been asserted it must be institutionalised through secret police, informer networks, kangaroo courts, imprisonment and executions.  Totalitarian systems provide the only example of a nation erecting a wall to keep its citizens in. 

During the last century and into this present one Marxian thought produced the "dictatorship of the proletariat" which, naturally, manifested itself as totalitarian dictatorship by an elite.  Lenin, Stalin, the Ceaucsescus, Honecker all executed totalitarian control over their own citizens. 

Once the citizenry has been pacified and the regime's idiotic economic mismanagement produces famine and destitution, the totalitarian state looks for scapegoats.
  Others come into the frame--other nations.  Allegations of nations interfering in domestic affairs become normal; the state puts itself on a perpetual war footing.  Before long, national pride demands a war. 

This has been the perpetual cycle of behaviour in North Korea now for over twenty years.  We are told that a military action of some sort against South Korea is imminent.  It may well escalate into full blown war between the two nations.  It's what totalitarian states do. 

Recent Korean history reveals a sobering possibility: It may only be a matter of time before North Korea launches a sudden, deadly attack on the South. And perhaps more unsettling, Seoul has vowed that this time, it will respond with an even stronger blow.

Humiliated by past attacks, South Korea has promised - as recently as Tuesday - to hit back hard at the next assault from the North, opening up the prospect that a skirmish could turn into a wider war.  Lost in the headline-making North Korean bluster about nuclear strikes on Washington in response to U.N. sanctions is a single sentence in a North Korean army Supreme Command statement of March 5. It said North Korea "will make a strike of justice at any target anytime as it pleases without limit."

Those words have a chilling link to the recent past, when Pyongyang, angry over perceived slights, took its time before exacting revenge on rival South Korea. Vows of retaliation after naval clashes with South Korea in 1999 and 2009, for example, were followed by more bloodshed, including attacks blamed on North Korea that killed 50 South Koreans in 2010.

An irony, however, in all of this is that Western democratic nations have been engaged in wars and military actions for about as long as modern totalitarian states.  Many of these wars have not been defensive in nature, but a positive offensive action to secure ideological goals: liberty, equality, and fraternity.  We in the West feel better about such wars because they are "noble".  But to totalitarianistas their wars are equally noble in defence of an equally high principle: the eventual freedom of the working man, the wretched of the earth, from all forms of exploitation.  To Islamists their wars are in honour of the name of Allah, to establish his reign via the universal caliphate.  Equally ideological, equally driven by utopian, millenarian beliefs.

The political ideology of the Christian faith is profoundly different.  It is definitely millenarian in its focus and intent.  All the nations of the earth will be discipled.  But the reign of Christ comes without the sword, without force, without violence.  Its sword is the Word of God preached and proclaimed; its initial sphere is the transformation of the human heart, individual by individual.  Then, it extends to all that disciples of Christ do in this world: loving, serving, worshipping, giving, marrying, bearing and raising children, and so forth. 

Christianity has a doctrine of the military sword, but its only justification is armed defence of citizens: it is never to advance a cause, or an ideal.  The reason the West has become so bellicose in recent decades is due to its departure from Christianity.  Since it no longer believes in a millennium wrought by Christ in the hearts and minds of men, it begins to seek a utopia won by the sword.  At this point it comes increasingly to imitate the military doctrine of totalitarianism or of Islam. 

Not a pretty sight at all.