Just War, Jeremiah, and Jeremiah Weed
You’ve probably never heard of the hard-edged brand of low-priced bourbon called Jeremiah Weed, and for darn good reason: It is almost unavailable, except on Air Force bases. But U.S. fighter pilots go through the stuff like airplane fuel, and some concede it tastes pretty much the same. As one airman wrote online of the drink: “Weed is one of those things you wonder why anyone would consume! However, after you choke down the first one you try another. After three to four, it becomes strangely pleasant and smooth…. It’s one of those creepy drinks that sneaks up on you long after you thought you had it licked, and inexplicably erases all memory of the evening.”
Jeremiah Weed has been adopted as the almost-official liquor of America’s fighter pilots, who drink it on special occasions out of spent cannon shells—though none can explain exactly why. The closest thing to a trustworthy account appears in C. R. Anderegg’s memoir Sierra Hotel, where he writes of pilots who came to a desert saloon after checking out the site where one of them had crashed a plane. At a nearby bar, they convinced the bearded bartender to join them in a drinking game called “Afterburners”, which involves slamming back shots of whiskey set on fire…. And you don’t want to hear the rest. It involves singed flesh, a blazing beard, and penitent pilots purchasing a case of cheap bourbon from a bartender who was headed for the burn ward. And thus began a tradition. Our pilots have been choking down the stuff ever since.
By inscrutable Providence or happy accident, this bourbon shares a name with one of the Old Testament’s greatest prophets, whose message warned of fire and war (though he didn’t mention crashing F-16s, at least in the Douay-Rheims Catholic translation). Jeremiah taught in the seventh century B.C., at a time when the Jewish nation occupied a unique position: It stood like a deer in the headlights in the middle of the road.
Once a major power in the region under kings David and Solomon, the Jewish kingdom had torn itself apart in civil wars and lapsed from strict religious practice—despite a series of increasingly irritable prophets. To make things worse, the remaining land of Judah lay smack dab between two aggressive empires.
The prophets whom God sent to His people carried a two-fold message, which can be boiled down to this: “Go to Temple—and don’t provoke the goyim!” Again and again, the prophets of Israel countered the claims of ambitious kings and zealous nationalists (think of them as the first neocons), whose plans for national greatness entailed risky and needless wars. In fact, the Hebrew prophets were the precursors of the Christian critique of conquest. While the Church has never advocated outright pacifism, beginning with St. Augustine it has developed increasingly strict criteria by which to judge the causes and conduct of war. The Just War tradition specified that Christians should only take part in a war if it is
• In a good cause, i.e., to repel aggression or protect the innocent. (No, “revenge,” “a presidential sex scandal” or “an upcoming election” don’t count.)
• Waged by legitimate authorities.
• Reasonably likely to succeed.
• Unlikely, proportionately, to cause more harm than good.
• The last resort after attempted negotiations.
• Waged with the minimum force necessary, making every attempt to protect civilians.
These criteria take all the fun out of war—banning naked land-grabs, empire building, torture, mass-rape, fire-bombing cities, and the use of America’s 10,000 or so nukes for pretty much anything at all. Since the Just War tradition is such a buzz-kill, Christians of a certain kind often argue it away as cleverly as a canon lawyer wangling an annulment for a Kennedy.
Sadly, the kings and people of Israel did something similar. They disdained their peacenik prophets, and instead marched off to disaster in places we now call Lebanon and Iraq. This suggests to us that certain current politicians eager to remake the Middle East are indeed reading their Bible. They just don’t understand it.
By Jeremiah’s time, the rump Jewish kingdom called Judah was a subject ally of the rising empire of Babylon. Judah had to pay tribute, but its people could live untroubled, and Jerusalem’s Temple was left untouched. Jeremiah’s message mirrored that of previous prophets: He urged the Israelites to leave well enough alone. Instead of allying with one pagan kingdom—and provoking the others—or “arming for peace,” the Jews should concentrate on pleasing God. He alone had given them their kingdom in the first place, and only He could save it. But Judah’s ruling class were not keen to listen; it didn’t help that Jeremiah’s idea of tact included phrases like “You have polluted the land with your whoring and wickedness.” (Jeremiah, 3:2) Eager to throw off the yoke of Babylon, Judah’s king cut off the tribute and allied with the bumbling king of Egypt who promised to bail the Israelites out. “Fat chance,” said Jeremiah. (My own, contemporary translation.)
Jeremiah wandered the countryside, often two steps ahead of a lynch mob, warning the people and king that their policies would bring on disaster: “I will even give them into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of them that seek their life: and their dead bodies shall be for meat unto the fowls of the heaven, and to the beasts of the earth,” to be specific. (Jeremiah 34:20)
For his candor, Jeremiah was locked in chains, chased from town to town, and condemned as a traitor who did not support the troops. When the Babylonians did indeed invade, destroy Jerusalem, level the Temple, and lead almost all the Jews off to slavery in exile, those who were left behind dragged Jeremiah off to Egypt—where they would finally pay him back for his prescience by stoning him to death.
From all this, I draw a message for today: When politicians propose a war, get behind it. Don’t ask if it’s just, wise, or winnable—or even which country it is against. Just put that yellow ribbon sticker on your car, hunker down, and support the president. It beats getting stoned in Egypt.
Of course, that’s cold comfort to the brave souls who’ll have to fly combat missions over Pyongyang, Pakistan, or Paris. It’s your duty at least to pray for them—and maybe send a case of Jeremiah Weed.
Excerpted from The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Wine, Whiskey, and Song with the gracious permission of the author.
Comments
This article makes no sense. What are you trying to point out? Drawing a parallel between
isreal not listening to her prophets and Iraq is pretty inane. This sounds like the vaporings
of someone who has been exposed to too much Weed. I hope you are not representative of
Catholicism because, if you are, it’s ability to reason is bankrupt.
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A pleasant essay, made more enjoyable by linking the biblical ancients with contemporary sky jockeys. Thanks for the insights and, in particular, thanks for not subscribing to a rather unpleasant tendency on this web site to use demeaning and belittling labels for Americans of European origins. Thanks!
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Of course this excerpt makes sense, especially as analogy to the current Neocon created mess in Iraq.
My greatest interest is in the list that justifies war:
• In a good cause, i.e., to repel aggression or protect the innocent. (No, “revenge,” “a presidential sex scandal” or “an upcoming election” don’t count.)
• Waged by legitimate authorities.
• Reasonably likely to succeed.
• Unlikely, proportionately, to cause more harm than good.
• The last resort after attempted negotiations.
• Waged with the minimum force necessary, making every attempt to protect civilians.
It is a Yank thing to violate Christian Just War. Consider Honest Abe’s war.
The seceding states were not attacking the non-seceding states or their capital. Nor can the Unionists claim to have been protecting the innocent, for the Confederates were not rounding up and imprisoning those who had been against secession. Later, Unionists would claim that slavery justified the war, but that was, as even Liberal historian Peter Kolchin admits, not part of the original Linclon war reasoning. In addition, if the Unionists war were to end the evil of slavery, then the Union would have had to invade and destroy non-seceding states. In fact, in 1861, as Leon Litwack notes in North of Slavery, there were slaves legally owned in the states of New York and New Jersey.
Lincoln was legimate, but he had no power to wage war as he did, and his usurpations set the precedent for all the Presidential horrors we have seen since.
The Unionist war was reasonably likely to succeed, but not without massive loss of life, which means that it was certain to cause at least as much harm as it could possibly facilitate good.
Lincoln refused to negotiate, so that one is an obvious failure to meet the criteria.
Lincoln’s war was NOT waged with the minimal force or with any desire to minimize casualities, even among Unionist soldiers. In fact, it was waged, certainly its final 3 years, with a concerted effort to harm Confederate states civilians and their ability to live.
If the most sacred war in (Yankee) American mythology so obviously violated Christian Just War, and it did, then how can we expect any better when Uncle Sam sends the soldiers of his Sacred Union to slaugher desert dwellers on the other side of the globe?
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Brilliant—Just brilliant.
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Civil War or secession is a gray area of the just war theory. Mr Cantrell’s facts are also wrong. The Confederate government would only negotiate the terms of their secession (i.e, defeat for the Union forces). It also made life hell for the (numerous) pro-Union Southerners. The pro_unionist people of Eastern Tennesee greeted Gen. Burnside’s troops so effusively after two years of Confederate rule that the general and his staff were reduced to tears!Of course, neither side knew how costly the war would be in human life; nevertheless, the Confederate government fought on long after any reasonable hope of succcess had passed. This is a clear violation of just war doctrine and cost the South dearly in blood and treasure (much of the physical destruction in the South came after all hope was gone).
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Ted Van Oosbree? Isn’t that the “name” of a presumed agent for the Christ-hating SPLC that has been part of trouble for both the Chronicles site and Robert Sungenis?
To assert that I have my facts wrong and then to fail to note one incorrect fact I asserted should be enough to tip off readers that ‘Mr. Van Oosbree’ is at best a parrot of the Lincoln/Sacred Union cult.
It is good, however, that he acknowledges that civil war and secession are two very different things. The conjunction “or” between the two so signifies. The rest of the sentence is absurd, at best. Of course, claiming that civil war is a gray area for Christian Just War is a way to exonerate both the Anglo-Saxon Puritans (say, for raping and then slaughtering nuns in Ireland) and the Jacobins as they slaughtered civilians and destroyed civilization as surely as the pagan and Arian Germans did in Late Antiquity.
Lincoln refused to negotiate. Until you negotiate, you ccannot know what can be negotiated. Lincoln refused even to discuss the legitmacy of secession, which has NEVER been proven wrong save by might makes right warring. To claim that the party that refused to negotiate at all is somehow freed from having needed to negotiate is a nice Trotskyite approach.
My anti-secession ancestors lived much easily the first half of the War than the second half, after Union troops took over, and during Reconstruction. There were at least as many people in non-seceding staes that supported the Confederacy’s right to secede, and Lincoln and the Republicans waged culture war on them. How many were imprisoned? How any pro-secession or pro-Democrat newspapers were shut down by Lincoln and the Republicans? Were those acts to silence free speech somehow proof that Lincoln honored Christian Just War?
As only about 60% of East Tennesseans were pro-Union, with most East Tennessee counties turning out per capita volunteers for the Confederate Army at rates insignificantly lower than Middle and West Tennessee counties, the number of people jubilant at the Union Army’s reign of terror would have been quite small. But that avoids the issue almost as much as ‘Mr. Van Oosbree’ does. When Hitler’s troops took Austria, many people greeted the Nazi trrops so effusively that Nazi leaders wept. Did that exonerate Hitler from his violations of Christian Just War?
I really like the claim that the war crimes against large numbers of Southern civilians was caused by the Confederacy’s failure to surrender soon enough. As they did not surrender quickly enough, poor Honest Abe was FORCED to oversee the slaughter of civilians. That logic could be vomited by Leon Trotsky, and it makes my point that Lincoln lovers tend to be as insanely, self-righteously vicious as Trotskyites. Of course, the two come together in the Neocon movement.
If not surrendering quickly enough to keep the victor from waging war against civilians is violation of Christian Just War, then what is going to war without just cause and ending up waging war against civilians? Jacobin Just War? Pagan Just War? Puritan Just War? Secular Democracy Just War? Talmudic Just War?
It most decidedly is NOT Christian Just War.
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As the discussion between Mr. Cantrell and Mr. Van Oosbree clearly shows, both sides can wage an unjust war. Just being on the defense, as the South was then and as the Iraqi insurgents are now, is not a moral blank check.
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Cantrell? Isn’t that the name of the Yankee renegade who led a terrorist group for the Confederacy back in the Civil War? Don’t laugh, that’s just about as likely as me being an agent of the SPLC! Yours in Christ!
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Is this irony ? I don’t get it.
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The astonishingly informed Mr. Oosbree must be referring to the Confederate guerilla William Clarke Quantrill. I am a member of the Quantrill Society historical group.
Were I Mr. Cantrell, I’d be flattered beyond words. Quantrill’s guerillas—bad guys, good guys mixed together—sent shock waves clear to Lincoln’s bedroom. These guerillas also birthed Jesse James and the James-Younger Gang, Belle Starr and others. How would his relatives in Hollywood and the MSM ever have survived without them? Speaking of such, “The Outlaw Josey Wales” is an old movie worth seeing.
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Actually I have heard of Jerimiah Weed. And have
drank the stuff but it has been many years.
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It seems that in analyzing the Civil War, we have to keep two things separate.
On the one hand, America is an “imperialist” country. We wouldn’t have allowed a part of our country to split off in the 1860’s, any more than we allowed the Mexicans to keep Texas or California when we decided we wanted them. We can talk about the constitutionality of the Civil War or its agreement with Just War theory until we’re blue in the face, but the reality is that Americans of that time wouldn’t have allowed such questions to stop them. I know that sounds pretty cynical, but I think we have to face our character as Americans. I hope we can get away from this imperialism.
The other matter is the sincerity of Lincoln’s commitment to ending slavery. The fact that he put more importance on holding the Union together doesn’t mean he wasn’t really committed to ending it. He probably hoped that if the Union could be kept together, Congress would eventually end it. Most likely he thought allowing secession would delay the ending of slavery in the South. I know that’s not his entire reason for opposing secession, but he probably held this opinion and thought of it as a “moral imperative.”
Putting those two things together, I don’t think there’s any reason to deny Lincoln was the “man of the hour” for America. He led Americans in the direction they wanted to go. Of course that doesn’t excuse a lot of the brutalities of the war, as I implied above.
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John Zmirak ... Defames a fine Bourbon Liqueur ... Jeremiah Weed. For some an acquired taste, but a pleasant one. Straight -up or on the Rocks with a lime, a pleasant way to cap a Winter day or a Summer afternoon especially with a few friends. I keep a ‘Skull & Crossbones’ jug filled with J-Weed in my shop to share with visitors. It always puts a smile on their faces when I grab the jug and shot glasses .....Good Times Indeed!
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I like Jeremiah Weed but it seems no body in Jacksonville. Florida Any help out , ille, Florida sells it. Any help out there?
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