Through the Historical Looking Glass
A little while ago, I was watching Enemy at the Gates, a WWII movie about the Russian sharp-shooting sniper who single-handedly saved Stalingrad from falling to the Nazi's. I enjoy a good war movie. I find it helps me personalize war, and helps form my pacifist identity. There's a scene in the movie where Russian soldiers are running away from the Nazi machine guns, only to be gunned down by their own generals who wouldn't put up with cowardice. Watching that, it hit me, Joseph Stalin was our ally.

The classical pro-war argument is always, "we had to go to war to stop Hitler." If we would write a list of the most evil men of the last 100 years, Stalin and Hitler would be pretty close together. Looking back, to justify war, allying with an evil man is inexcusable. Should we then have fought them both? Truly if we were on the side of truth and justice, and Hitler and Stalin later proved to be evil, then we should have allied with neither. Would God have helped us to victory against both Russia and Germany? No historian I know would say that the Allies would have won the war without Russia. If Stalin and Hitler could have gotten along (impossible of course because of Hitler's expansionist agenda, blah, blah, blah, I know), could they have been stopped? Would we still be saying that God helped us to victory if we lost? We won the war because Hitler hadn't played enough Risk to know that a two front war is a terrible idea, not because God supported our cause, nor because God was maintaining the Jewish race for the resurrecting of the 144,000.

I am not trying to remove God from history, but trying to put history back in history. God supported the Jews who were persecuted during the war, just like he supported the blacks that were being persecuted twenty years later in the southern US. The Kingdom of God has no earthly borders.

   [ posted by William @ 1:37 AM ]