For Christians, this week is the heart of our liturgical year. Easter week is a time of gratitude and celebration; a time of joy that rises above the frictions of everyday life and reminds us of our eternal destiny. But of course, a fallen world rarely cooperates. Sages from Heraclitus to Hobbes have claimed that “war is the father of all things” and the natural state of man. So it has seemed throughout history. So it seems now, in our own time.
This Easter week marks the 81st anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s death. A gifted Lutheran pastor and theologian, Bonhoeffer cofounded Germany’s Confessing Church movement in the 1930s to oppose the Nazification of his country’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Third Reich hanged him at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. The charge was treason, based on his rescue of Jews and spreading information about anti-regime resistance, but finally – and decisively – on his links to the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.
Bonhoeffer was a skilled writer and teacher. And among his most widely known comments is this: “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.” The words are memorable. Whether he actually said them is disputed. But it doesn’t matter. They’re true in their meaning, and Bonhoeffer’s life and death embodied them.
I remembered those words over the Easter weekend, reading a Wall Street Journal editorial. The Journal is not a fan of the current occupant of the White House. Its pages are filled with criticism of the man in charge, his manner, and his policies. But in “The North Korea Lesson for Iran,” it outlines 40 years of failed diplomacy with a committed, intensely dangerous enemy, and warns of “what happens when the US puts conflict avoidance above all else.”
Starting in the early 1980s, the Pyongyang regime systematically lied to, outmaneuvered, and threatened the international community while pursuing its nuclear weapons program. The United States responded with indecision. As a result, North Korea is now believed to possess:
some 50 warheads, and it tests ICBMs that will one day be able to reach the continental U.S. The latest missile test came [last] Sunday. The lesson is that U.S. Presidents waited too long to stop North Korea. The risks of war were always said to be too high, it was never a good time, and there was always another diplomatic option to exhaust. North Korea is now a nuclear power, which means it could escalate to devastating effect in any conflict.
There’s more:
This is more or less the path that at least four presidents took with Iran. Talks, deals, and economic relief were in ample evidence, with sanctions used as a negotiating tactic but without a credible threat of force. Like Pyongyang, Tehran agreed to a deal that didn’t require it to come clean about past nuclear activities and left [its] nuclear infrastructure intact for the future. Iran’s regime never stopped pursuing the bomb.
And finally: “We don’t know how the current Iran conflict will end, but we do know Iran’s radical regime will not have a nuclear program when it’s over.”
One can hope. My own views on the Iran conflict, at least as it stands to date, are detailed elsewhere. So far, criticism of the U.S.-Israeli effort has been an alloy of serious and urgent moral concern; common sense anxiety for the outcome; and chronic loathing of the man at the desk in the current Oval Office – with a pinch of anti-Jewish hatred for Israel tossed in from both left and right.
Mentioning Dietrich Bonhoeffer in connection with any of this, of course, risks a very unpleasant response. We remember Bonhoeffer as a martyr, not the conspirator in a planned tyrannicide. The differences between his time and ours, between the Germany of April 1945 and our own world of April 2026, are too many to count. And a gulf of moral character and heroism separates a man like Bonhoeffer from every recent U.S. president, including the one we have now. The point here is simply this: History never repeats itself. But the patterns of human behavior that make history repeat themselves all the time.
When Iran commits to, and persists in pursuing, the destruction of Israel and the punishment of America as humanity’s “Great Satan,” most Jews know to believe it. They remember what such words mean from events of the last century. For Israel, Tehran is not simply an enemy, but an ongoing existential threat.
Americans are different. We take our success and advantages for granted. We’ve had no war on our soil for 160 years. We have the luxury of comfort and distractions; of imagining that what happens in the Middle East is far away, someone else’s problem, and can’t really hurt us here at home – this, despite 47 years of relentless Tehran-sponsored violence, tens of thousands of casualties worldwide, dishonest negotiations, and systematic lies toward a nuclear weapons goal and the magnified evil that would entail. The lies and the violence won’t stop. They can’t, because they’re hardwired into the DNA of a regime moved by religiously diseased hate.
In America we have the freedom to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ joyfully and in public this Easter week. The laws, the faith, and the material power we still have make this possible. We’re far from a pure or innocent country; all nations are mixed clay. But some nations choose a course much worse than others; one that threatens far more than their immediate neighbors.
Justice and prudence need to guide our actions. As far as possible, and as the Journal also stresses, the burden of pain must be borne by Iran’s murder regime, not its people. But that’s not an excuse for paralysis when all other avenues to prevent a grave, impending danger fail. Doing nothing in the face of such evil is itself evil. And not to act is to act.
