Empires Rise and Fall – Daniel Berrigan

The presumed immortality of the empire has a horrid price attached… the death, even of great numbers, even of the innocent, must be rendered plausible, even normal. So the victims are variously demonized or stripped of their very dignity, their very faces. They are abstractions, “the enemy,” “the tyrant,” and so on. They are expendable. To the numbed citizenry, such lethal behavior on the part of authorities becomes a sort of wearisome abstraction… As we have seen it again and again in our lifetime, in our own country: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It is really astonishing, that from Babylon to Assyria to Egypt to Rome, the biblical story is the same. The empires rise, the empire does unutterable harm to the world, then the empire declines and falls. — Daniel Berrigan (Testimony: The Word Made Flesh, p. 176)