A TALE OF TWO WARS: A LESSON FOR THE AMERICAN CHURCH FROM WAR-TORN UKRAINE
Americans are following Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine with great interest and heavy hearts. So are the Russians. However, the Russian people are hearing a very different story. When Putin attacked Ukraine on February 24th, Russia’s state media spun it like this;
Today Russia started a special military operation to protect people who have been subject to abuse and genocide by the Kyiv regime for the last eight years.[1]
Two weeks later, when a heartbreaking photo surfaced of an injured pregnant woman fleeing the bombed-out maternity hospital in Mariupol, the Russian people were told she was an actor, and suggested she wasn't even pregnant.
Unfortunately for the Kremlin, the rest of the world knows better. Like no other war in history, the horror of this war is being broadcast to the world through graphic photos and videos captured on the smartphones of ordinary Ukrainian citizens. While the Ukrainian men are fighting the Russian army with guns, many of their wives are fighting with smartphone cameras. A group of women calling themselves the “Dattalion,” (combining the words, "data” and “battalion”) was founded just three days after Russia’s invasion. Their mission is simple: “We want to spread truth to the world, and video. . . is our weapon.”[2] The images of slaughtered Ukrainian men, women, and children are deeply disturbing. But the women of the Dattalion, for whom this war is deeply personal and profoundly painful, believe you have a right–even the responsibility–to see what they are seeing and experiencing. As of this writing, they have uploaded well over 1,700 videos and photos to their website (www.dattalion.com) showing bloodied civilians dazed from Russian shelling, and dead bodies lying in the streets. One gut-wrenching video showed a hysterical mother standing by helplessly as her 2-year-old daughter was loaded into an ambulance. Her tiny abdomen bled profusely from being hit by a Russian mortar round. She died soon after arriving at the hospital. To date, Putin and his army have killed at least 150 children and wounded more than 840 others.
Interestingly, no one is complaining that this use of graphic images of murdered and wounded children is “gratuitous” or “in poor taste.” No one has accused these women of using graphic images to manipulate our emotions. And apart from Putin and his collaborators, no one has dared to dismiss the images as “fake.” In fact, these photos and videos are serving to unite the world against Putin and his army.
As the women of the Dattalion have shown us, people never fight harder–or smarter–than when they fight for themselves. This war is personal for them. Their lives and the lives of their loved ones are gravely threatened, and they cannot afford to surrender what is indisputably one of their most powerful weapons, the photographic evidence of Vladimir’s barbarity. A picture paints a thousand injustices.
Of course, a war is also being waged in our own land against vulnerable children. Just over a week ago, a pro-life activist produced photos and videos of five unborn children who had been aborted in the third trimester in our nation’s capital. The babies were reportedly killed at the Washington Surgi-Center abortion clinic. Their bodies were then given to the activist by an employee of Curtis Bay Medical Waste Services, a biohazard waste company the Surgi-Center hired to dispose of their dead victims. According to a press release, the activist temporarily had the babies in her home and had “privately arranged for the Metropolitan Washington D.C. police homicide unit to pick up five recently discovered late-term aborted babies for forensic examination. Their late gestational ages, as well as their apparent sustained injuries, potentially show violations of the Partial-Birth Abortion Act as well as the Born Alive Infants Protection Act,” [3] which would amount to federal crimes.
The images of these battered children are horrific and shed even more light on what we have known for decades: legalized abortion is the greatest human rights violation of our day. Not unlike the Russian state-controlled media, own media are doing all they can to spin this story. Rolling Stone referred to this woman’s efforts to expose the evil of abortion as a “stunt” and “a horrifying heist, a cruel hoax, or some mixture of the two.”[4] Of course, Rolling Stone’s editor felt no journalistic compulsion to publish the photos of these aborted children. The D.C. medical examiner’s office is refusing to perform autopsies on these little ones. The Washington Post stated, “Ashan Benedict, D.C. police’s executive assistant chief of police, told reporters Thursday that the fetuses appeared to have been aborted ‘in accordance with D.C. law [and] there doesn’t seem to be anything criminal in nature about that except for how they got into this house.’”[5]So, the real criminal, according to Benedict, is not the ghoulish one who killed these children–and potentially after they had already been born–but the pro-lifer who dared to expose this evil.
Unfortunately, the unborn cannot fight for themselves. The Church must fight for them. Exposing the demonic act of abortion is the duty of the Church. Ephesians 5:11, says, “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.” If abortion is not a “fruitless deed of darkness,” what is? Just as the world needs to see the effects of Putin’s war on the children of Ukraine, the world needs to see the effects of abortion’s war on the unborn. If pastors and churches will not expose this evil, who will? Pro-life author and speaker Jonathon Van Maren writes, “The history of social reform shows us that not a single injustice has ever been ended by covering up evidence of that injustice.”[6] I urge you to look at the mangled bodies of these five victims of abortion by clicking on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whspHwzusi4
Lily, one of the Dattalion’s leaders, stated that once you have seen the images of Putin’s war, “You cannot right now only think about yourself.”[7] She’s right. When our eyes are opened to such injustice, we become responsible to act on behalf of the oppressed. And if we refuse to open our eyes to the evil injustice of legalized abortion then we have already acted. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay everyone according to what they have done?
– Proverbs 24:11-12
[1] CBS News report, March 13, 2022, www.cbsnews.com
[2] Fox News, March 15, 2022, www.foxnews.com
[3] LifeNews, April 5, 2022, www.lifenews.com
[4] Rolling Stone, April 5, 2022, www.rollingstone.com
[5] The Washington Post, April 1, 2022, www.washingtonpost.com
[6] Jonathon Van Maren, Seeing Is Believing, (Toronto, Ontario: Life Cycle Books, 2017), 84
[7] Fox News, March 15, 2022, www.foxnews.com