Vatican: Stop Glorifying Violence

At a time when Bush proposes major increases in military spending, the Vatican warns that such militarism is not the answer. Many on the American right are only too willing to embrace violence as the first, rather than the last, resort, failing to comprehend that violence backfires more often than not (the famous disproportionate consequences). In fact, the latter core component of the just war principles is constantly ignored by the war party, with their simple one-dimensional, almost deterministic, view of the world. So much so in fact, that I would argue that they actually reject the actual principle itself, rather than its to specific circumstances.

As reported by Rocco Palmo, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican observer at the UN outpost in Geneva, echoed Pope Benedict recently when he said that tackling underlying economic injustice was a precondition for achieving true peace. Also important is "stopping a revived arms race and the proliferation of a variety of weapons [and] rejecting the glorification of violence in the media." He lambasted the "culture of conflict", or the idea that clashes are unavoidable and that war is natural. Yes, the American right needs to pay more attention to what the Vatican is saying. On practically every foreign policy issue since the last Pope Benedict (during the first world war), it has been right.