After Socrates was sentenced to death for teaching the young people of Athens to ask questions of their elders, his followers offered him various ways to escape drinking the hemlock. Socrates wouldn’t go along. He instead asked the question he had asked many times before, “Is it worse to suffer harm or to do harm to others?” He was unequivocal: you do more harm to yourself if you do evil than if you let someone else harm you.

Not only Socrates, but Jesus too answered the same way – by giving His life. The Christian Gospel makes no sense in any other way. Without the Cross, there is no path to the fullness of life. Jesus gave the two greatest commandments as these: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ … And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’” (Mt 22.37-39)

As if that were not enough, Jesus elaborated on that commandment at the Last Supper. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (Jn 15.12-13)

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Jesus did not talk much about commandments. However, when it came to the call to love “with all your heart,” He was unequivocal. We must be willing to give everything, even our lives.

Every time a Western power invades another country, the defenders of militarism roll out the just war theory to try to scrape together a rationale for the bloodshed that will occur. “We are preventing a greater evil,” as though it were humanly possible to put evils on a scale and weigh them. “Our country represents goodness and light, while the other country is evil.” Yet to promote goodness, you will do evil? “Our military action will protect us from what the bad guys will do to us,” as if we had near-certain knowledge of what that might be.

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War has always been the exercise of raw power to subdue or even destroy an enemy. In the past century or longer, new technology has led to the killing of massive numbers of people, both soldiers and the innocent, which no legal formula can justify. The consequences which were to be so wonderful for humanity are invariably atrocious – shattered families and communities, blood running in the street, a legacy of hate, social and economic structures that remain chaotic for decades, and the near-impossibility of establishing democracy and the rule of law.

Yet we are invariably reassured that this time, everything will work out fine. The rationale for the slaughter is always flimsy, such as Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction that provided the excuse for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Iraq War was also going to liberate the Iraqi people and end terrorism. Amazing how that turned out.

Regarding Iran, planning for the aftermath is scant or non-existent. The main goal of the United States and Israel appears to be destruction for the sake of destruction. The Islamic regime and ideology are so thoroughly integrated into the society that it appears most unlikely that what comes after the war will be anything like the democracy and personal liberty that Western nations profess to uphold.

And the Iranian people so desperate for a better way of life that thousands gave their lives in protests a little more than a month ago will again be left high and dry. “We have no ability to get into the nation-building business,” said Mike Johnson, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. That is both true and reprehensible. Outsiders should not determine what the new Iran will be like. Neither should they abandon the people who suffered so much under the Islamic regime.

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Following the Second World War, the United States offered the Marshall Plan to help Western Europe rebuild. That was in the interests of the Europeans, who badly needed the help, as well as the Americans, who wanted to restrain Soviet communism and cash in on post-war prosperity. Since that time, the desire to help weaker nations become strong has slowly disappeared. That was evident when one of the Trump regime’s first items of business was to abolish USAID.

Today, the Christian ethic is absent. The widespread response to Socrates’ question is that it is better to do harm to others than to suffer harm oneself. That is the age-old motif of the powerful. Violence, however, begets anarchy and more violence. The only real solutions arise from non-violence.