Some 120,000 men, women, babies, girls, and boys evaporated from the surface of the earth during the atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945.

That was the last year of the Second World War. Eight years later, during Thanksgiving, I was 30 miles from Nagasaki in the Japanese port city of Sasebo, on my way to Korea during the war there. Had I known that I was this close to that second atomic holocaust, the turkey dinner we were served before embarking for Inchon might have turned on me.

Everyone who has been in a combat zone knows that war is hell, that it has a way of blurring what is right and what is wrong, and that it presents a place and a situation where “kill or be killed” directs the next move.

None of this should ever make us forget, however, that since we are created in the image of God, as Scripture informs us, each of us is called to do God’s will, even when His will is not our will.

That is certainly a difficult assignment to follow. But whatever the arguments may be to justify the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those actions prove beyond a doubt that the United States has been quite capable of mass brutality.

Other massacres – of Armenians, Russians, Cambodians, European Jews, peoples everywhere over the centuries – only feed my hostility toward what I call “official murder.” For that, in plain language, is what slaying people by government edict is, whether directly by a Saddam Hussein or indirectly by a Harry Truman.

Lest I be tagged “pacifist“ or “anti-war fanatic,” let me state up front that I am in full accord with the need and duty to protect one’s family, home, and country from its enemies. When the immediate outcome of a conflict is death at the hands of an attacker, be the first to shoot. After all is said and done, there can be no legitimate dispute that self-defense is a natural right of every human being, and this essential of survival mandates an alert and fully prepared military force.

Not all wars have been defensive, however. Some have been offensive in that the initial attacker was deliberately made to fire the first shot. This, the stuff of untold history, westerns, and kids’ dirty games is, for civilized adults, criminal activity, however advertised for consumption. Calling it “preemptive” defense does not remove it from the list of excuses for illicit attack, nor does it justify provocation for battle. To instigate war is to share the responsibility for the “official murder” of innocent people. “Killing people and breaking things” is not a joke, as some seem to think unless your opponent has attempted to kill you and break your things. No “break-and-kill” brigades of history can ride such a moral high horse as to mandate attacking a country strictly out of righteousness.

Disregard for other people’s lives forms a deadly attitude among many of our leaders and officials. A prominent example of this insensitivity to human life is that of neocon war-hawks who mock critics of war and wear badges of patriotism and virtue without knowing what either means. Ask any such ad hoc “patriots” how defense equals invasion and you can bet that they will quickly change the subject and fill your head with platitudes instead of arguments.

I am not the only American thinker who has wondered why our government turned its back on its founders regarding foreign policy. Our government officials were warned in the earliest years of this republic not to get involved in foreign intrigues and alliances. This was and remains a call for keeping America smart and alert, not “isolationist,” as the war-hawk mantra calls it.

In a world far more dangerous than the founders could have imagined, it is necessary that we defend ourselves to the teeth. But even the most elaborate system of defense should not include “policing” other nations and telling non-Americans what kind of people they ought to be and what kind of government they should have, as though we were models of virtue and morality. Are we?

In abandoning its moral integrity America has in fact created a vacuum for world-conquest lunatics like those of the World Economic Forum, whose thoughts and plans for the world reveal a terminal case of insanity. What else to call the total commitment of Klaus Schwab and Company to ruining the world and its people?

Too many have forgotten what has always been well known, that progress takes a U-turn whenever haters of God, His Creation, and His people are allowed to take charge.

Whoever so hates people, the Creation, and the Creator as to allow “official murder” by government edict is one that would also sanction the killing of babies before they are born, abandoning science as a tool for the actual improvement of human life, warring against the Creator and attempting to smash what He created.

Against man’s “disobedience that brought death into the world” [re: Milton’s Paradise Lost], The Creator God’s Sixth Commandment stands, clear and bold: “Thou shalt not kill” [Exodus 20:13].

Confusion regarding this divine command, as applied to anything in real life, clears when – as has been pointed out often enough – it is understood as meaning that no one should take the life of another except in legitimate self-defense. The full meaning of the command is that no one should be so hateful of a human life as to want to end it, for that act would deny the value of one’s own life.

Anthony J. DeBlasi is a military and culture war veteran.

Image: Library of Congress, via Picryl / public domain