War: Neo-Constantian thawt Courts martial and courts civil -- reflecting on the difference

Neo-Constantian thawt is that stream of Christian-democratic theorizing, flowing from a Christian worldview that counters pacificism with the principles, arts, and sciences of warfare on behalf of people/s, their cultures, and civilizational achievements when oppressed or endangered to the extent they must make a decision to do something about their critical situation, thru armed means and the professions of warrior.

The Belmont Club is a blogsite that at times proves very useful to such Christian Democratic reality-minded citizens who look at their tradition's roots in the much-dilemmed and morally-conflicted figure of Saint Constantine the sinner Emporer who founded Byzantium, a capitol city at the heart of the Christian phase of the Roman Empire. So much for a past, and the refusal to be intimated by scurrilous drudgery about our Christian warriors, thru which the Just War theory emerged.

The Belmont Club has as a subtext to its headline name on its blogs, the rubric "History and History in the Making," That tells us that the turn of events in the shaping and re-shaping of the civilizations of the world often happens by force. And without the force the turn would not occur. Even then, often, not something well figured out beforehand, but however much strategized and varied in its deployment of now one set of tactics, and then in response to the changes in the military situation yet another set of tactics. The idea of a Christian politics which participates in the civic order extends also to the exigencies of preparedness for and pursuit of military goals in defense and pre-emption of a threat before it's too late. The Belmont Club is on many occasions a good school for thawt online in regard to the hard stuff of military reality, relevant to the post-9/11 world.

In his blog entry for Thursday, June 2, Belmont Club's Wretcherd, considers an important news-reflection under his title, "The Laws of War." In his meditation, Wretcherd is in dialogue with John Keegan writing an opinion piece in The Telegraph (London, UK), entitled, "Bad Law is making a Just War so much harder to fight." I think between these two gentlemen we get much clarifiation of the difference between military law and its pursuit of justice, in contrast to civil law, and its. The point that emerges for me is the difference made if/wgeb military justice is not restricted to its sphere and jurisdiction, and if/when civil justice is not restricted to its proper jurisdiction. Neither instrument of justice is absolute for the whole of the law.

The matter has importance for the situation of the soldier in a command, a situation that often a civil court is incompetent to understand. I will not go into cases, but there is an abundance of them current today, in Afghanistan (for Canada too, as it was in Somalia), in Iraq, and soon in a third extremely important war-zone that is emerging along the Mexicaon border, to which the USA will soon be forced to send armed military soldiering forces (but that is also another story, which we hope to engage with here on refWrite in the not too distant future).

Suffice it for now to recommend these two sources, Wretcherd of the Belmong Club and John Keegan in The Telegraph. What I'm wondering is whether there's place and time to convene online a Rookmaker Club of people both philosophically-informed and sharing a keen interest in geostratigic thawt with an emphasis on military reflection, people willing to access important insights of Reformational philosophy to enrich that reflection. Hans Rookmaker was a soldier in the Dutch army who was captured by the Nazis, placed in a prison camp, liberated at the end of the war, studied art history in which he took his doctorate, and became also an occupant of a special professorial chair in Reformational philosophy at the Dutch Military Academy. Eventually he received an appointment as Professor of Art History at the Free University (VU), Amsterdam. But, that combination in one person of concern for the philosophical cultivation of warriors whose courses of study included geostrategic concerns at a time when the Dutch, after Liberation, were allied in NATO and stood prepared for any possible exigency issuing from the aggressive stance of the Soviet Union and the captive states of the East Bloc in a divided Europe. That threat is gone now. But 9/11 tells us that the peaceful utopias we all would prefer are fantasies that often block us from a rich geostrategic thawt simply as citizens, voters, and perhaps decison-makers on thse matter. And in my case and for at least a few of refWrite's readers, has the time perhaps come to cultivate a Christian reference-point for neo-Constantian Christian-democratic political conviction, not shy to pursue a conversation on geostrategics? - Owlb