Indeed.

Which reminded me that I’d written a post on the subject back in 2007, and I thought it might be time to revisit it. So here it is again, very slightly edited.

You’ve all seen those posters and bumper stickers: “War is not the answer.”

You’ve also seen discussions of why those sporting them are incorrect; war has solved some things and provided answers to certain questions—such as whether, for example, there would be a 1000-year Reich.

I’ve spent some time puzzling over the use of the “war is not the answer” mantra. For some people—the less thoughtful—I think it’s merely a kneejerk catch phrase, a method to decorate a car in a way that says, “I’m a good person, not a bloodthirsty sonofabitch like those who advocate war.” This group (and I have no idea what percentage of the whole it might represent) has no particular understanding of history, especially the history of warfare, and no real thought about the limitations of the perfectibility of human nature.

And then there are those who really don’t have much interest in pacifism, but have an ultra-Leftist political agenda that an alliance with pacifists serves. These people see pacifists as a subset of the category “useful idiots” that they’ve found so very helpful over time.

That leaves us with the third category, the one that interests me most, the committed and relatively thoughtful and well-meaning people who sustain a hope that, although war will sometimes happen, they can promote a set of programs that will lead to a world in which war will be resorted to less and less. I will summarize their position by saying that, although they understand that war sometimes has provided short-term answers to certain questions (such as the one posited above about the Third Reich), it has never provided a long-term answer to the problem of human intra-species aggression on a large scale, and each war has introduced new problems in its wake that lead to further war.

In other words, when members of this third group say “War is not the answer” their accent is on the word “the.” War isn’t the final answer to the problems of human conflict, and although it may appear to solve some things, other problems are bound to arise that will lead to future wars.

Well, excuse me but: duh. Or to put it more politely: there are no solutions to the problem of human conflict that will eliminate the need for force at times, just as there are virtually no large-scale societies that can do away with police or prisons.

The advent of the atomic age gave pacifists—and their hopes for a way to end war—a boost, and understandably so. As dreadful as war has been in the first half of the twentieth century, with the invention of nuclear weapons it became far worse to contemplate. Early on in the atomic age the hope was that nations would be sane enough that the prospect of mutually assured destruction would be a powerful deterrent to any war, and that therefore—paradoxically—the very power of the weapons would be the reason they were unlikely to be used in the future.

Amazingly enough, so far that hope has been borne out; Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still both the first and the last times nuclear weapons have actually been detonated on a populace.

But that does not mean war has ended; sub-atomic conflicts have regularly sprung up around the world, and many of those are presently of the asymmetrical variety, involving terrorism and/or guerilla warfare and insurgencies. Another common type of war in recent times has been the internecine inter-tribal, inter-ethnic, and/or inter-religious conflicts of the third world, particularly Africa.

As for nuclear weapons, unfortunately they have recently become tools that seem more likely to be used. We now have an enemy who is less obviously interested in life than in death, and motivated at least in part by apocalyptic religious thinking (example: Iran). We also have another and related enemy that is not a state and therefore has no nation of people to protect, would be difficult to trace a bomb back to, and is driven by the same aforementioned religious motivation and otherwordly emphasis, (examples: al Qaeda and its spawn).

All of this fuels the depth of the desire to find an alternative to war—an alternative that provides not only “an” answer, but “the” answer, in a way that war never can. If you go to websites that promote pacifism, such as this one run by a Quaker lobby, you’ll find attempts to explain what that alternative solution should be [NOTE: unfortunately that link is now dead].

What you find there, of course, is not “the” answer, either. This is no surprise, because if you hold the more tragic (and, I believe, more realistic) view of human nature that I happen to hold, then you’re not looking for “the” answer, because you believe there never can be one.

There’s really nothing so terribly wrong with the “solutions” offered there (except for reliance on the corrupt and/or incompetent UN), at least as far as they go, which isn’t all that far. But let’s not fool ourselves. Pope John Paul II negotiating a deal between Argentina and Chile over the Beagle Channel, or a social service society soothing the seething shantytowns of Ahmedabad in India through street plays and festivals—laudable though such things may be—aren’t about to give us “the answer.”

Prevention is wonderful, and I’m all for it. It’s good to exercise aerobically, to eat healthfully, try to avoid carcinogens, and to get your vaccinations. The disease model dictates, however, that although an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, human beings rarely follow all the rules, and even those who do can end up with the shock of cancer or some other dread disease. When that happens, cure is worth many ounces of prevention, because prevention is no longer possible. And treatment must occur quickly.

Does that mean that someone who is diagnosed with cancer should give up practicing good health habits? Of course not; the two—prevention and treatment—work in tandem, and healthful practices can make treatment more effective. That’s why the “treatment” known as war does not preclude peace efforts such as those described on the Quaker website, as well.

War as a treatment? Yes—an exceptionally drastic one that should only be resorted to when there are no good alternatives, or when time has run out on the ones that might have worked in the past (the problem, of course, is deciding when that has happened). And like all drastic treatments it has many side effects, and can backfire and cause worse problems than those it attempts to address.

With war, every now and then there’s a cure, of course—World War II as a “cure” for Nazism, for example (although of course small pockets of that particular disease remain). But although World War II “cured” Nazism on a worldwide basis, the side effects were profound and devastating, and its aftermath fostered the growth of another already-existing disease: Communism.

Yes, indeed, war is not the answer to the problems that bring about armed conflict, and war is probably the least benign “treatment” on earth. But when prevention (and our very incomplete knowledge of how to accomplish it) has failed, sometimes it’s the only answer.

The post If war is not the answer, what is? appeared first on The New Neo.

The founders of Fruitlands weren’t a practical sort, but you can’t say they didn’t have ideals:

Their goal was to regain access to Eden by finding the correct formula for perfect living, following specific rules governing agriculture, diet, and reproduction…Calling themselves a “consociate family”, they agreed to follow a strict vegetarian diet and to till the land without the use of animal labor. After some difficulty, they relented and allowed some cattle to be “enslaved”. They also banned coffee, tea, alcoholic drinks, milk, and warm bathwater. They only ate “aspiring vegetables” ”” those which grew upward ”” and refused those that grew downward like potatoes. As Alcott had published earlier, “Our wine is water, ”” flesh, bread; ”” drugs, fruits.” For clothing, they prohibited leather because animals were killed for it, as well as cotton, silk, and wool, because they were products of slave labor. Alcott had high expectations but was often away when the community most needed him as he attempted to recruit more members.

The experimental community was never successful, partly because most of the land was not arable. Alcott lamented, “None of us were prepared to actualize practically the ideal life of which we dreamed. So we fell apart.”

Intellectuals.

Egad.

The group at Fruitlands also didn’t believe in purchasing property and in fact wanted to eliminate economic activity in general. Their vegetarianism was extreme enough to have extended to a refusal to eat honey. This shows more of the sort of idealistic thinking that was incompatible with the self-sufficient survival of which the founders dreamed [emphasis mine]:

Fruitlands members wore only linen clothes and canvas shoes; cotton fabric was forbidden because it exploited slave labor and wool was banned because it came from sheep. Bronson Alcott and [co-founder] Lane believed that animals should not be exploited for their meat or their labor, so they used no animals for farming. This arose out of two beliefs: that animals were less intelligent than humans and that, therefore, it was the duty of humans to protect them; and that using animals “tainted” their work and food, since animals were not enlightened and therefore unclean. Eventually, as the winter was coming, Alcott and Lane compromised and allowed an ox and a cow.

The Fruitlands experiment lasted seven miserable months. Alcott’s daughter Louisa May, who was ten at the time, got a bit of revenge for having been forced to endure that experience by writing a satire about Fruitlands and its denizens, titled Transcendental Wild Oats.

[NOTE: When I looked up Bronson Alcott’s Wiki entry, I found the following interesting bit of information about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s funeral: among the pallbearers were Alcott, Louis Agassiz, James Thomas Fields, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. That’s quite a group.]

[NOTE II: The Fruitlands philosophy regarding animals and other living creatures reminds me a bit of the Jains of India. However, the Jains seem less strict; they allow self-defense in some cases, for example, and they usually will eat dairy products:

In addition to other humans, Jains extend the practice of nonviolence towards all living beings. As this ideal cannot be completely implemented in practice, Jains recognize a hierarchy of life, which gives more protection to humans followed by animals followed by insects followed by plants.

For this reason, vegetarianism is a hallmark of Jain practice with the majority of Jains practicing lacto-vegetarianism. If there is violence against animals during the production of dairy products, veganism is also encouraged. After humans and animals, insects are the next living being offered protection in Jain practice with avoidance of intentional harm to insects emphasized. For example, insects in the home are often escorted out instead of killed.

After nonviolence towards humans, animals and insects, Jains make efforts not to injure plants any more than necessary. Although they admit that plants must be destroyed for the sake of food, they accept such violence only inasmuch as it is indispensable for human survival. Strict Jains, including Jain monks and nuns, do not eat root vegetables such as potatoes, onions and garlic, because tiny organisms are injured when the plant is pulled up, and also because a bulb or tuber’s ability to sprout is seen as characteristic of a living being.]

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Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, who served under Obama until last year, became the latest high-profile skeptic on Thursday, telling the House Intelligence Committee that a blanket prohibition on ground combat was tying the military’s hands. “Half-hearted or tentative efforts, or airstrikes alone, can backfire on us and actually strengthen our foes’ credibility,” he said. “We may not wish to reassure our enemies in advance that they will not see American boots on the ground.”

And yet that’s the very sort of thing Obama has been doing since he became Commander in Chief six and a half years ago—announcing all the things he would not do, and the dates of withdrawals even as he committed troops.

Obama campaigned as an antiwar president (except for Afghanistan, and even that was clearly half-hearted at best), not a warrior. So America got what it voted for. Obama benefited from the success of the Bush surge which Obama had so criticized. By the time of the 2008 election, terrorism and the Iraq War were not seen as pressing crises anymore, and people were eager to give a supposed peace president a chance (as was the committee awarding the Nobel Peace Prize).

What’s happening now is a combination of several elements. The first is Obama’s natural tendency to mull things over and dither, procrastinate and talk (and talk and talk and talk). That characteristic of Obama’s is being compounded by a very real dilemma re ISIS: this is a particularly knotty problem to tackle, and it may require an enormous outlay of time, effort, blood, and treasure. We may be very directly threatened by ISIS in a very big way some day, even some day soon. But for the moment ISIS seems quite far away. However, ISIS is destabilizing the already highly unstable Middle East, which could have enormous repercussions for us as well.

Then there’s the 2014 election. With Obama, politics is always huge, perhaps the hugest thing of all. The public is outraged at ISIS and angry at Obama’s inaction, so this is one situation where he may feel that he must act in a bellicose manner for political reasons. But the trick is to act just aggressive enough to placate the masses but not enough to risk becoming the war president he excoriated Bush for being, and in particular to avoid deploying the dread boots on the ground. ABB, Anything But Bush! That’s a delicate line on which Obama is trying to balance, and those pesky generals—who have the strange notion of actually wanting to win the conflict—get in his way.

Speaking of the generals—although Obama’s never said it, it’s probably also the case that he believes he’s a better general than his generals (““I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director”). So why should he listen to their advice, even if his goals were the same as theirs?

Civilian control of the military is a double-edged sword, with advantages and disadvantages and potential for discord. But has there ever been any other president who so consistently ignored his generals? LBJ liked to fine-tune the campaign, but did he conduct a war effort so clearly against their advice?

Although Obama was never against some bombing here and there, and of course he seems to like using drones, he has made his aversion to military action clear, and it was already clear when he was a candidate. It’s almost as though George McClellan (with the Copperhead-controlled platform) or Eugene McCarthy had won in 1864 and 1968, and had become Commanders-in-Chief during the Civil and Vietnam Wars, respectively.

In the 1970s, after Nixon was forced out and Ford became president (although never as a result of an election), it was a hugely Democratic and antiwar legislature that pushed the financial withdrawal and the Vietnam War’s end, rather than President Ford himself (see Ford’s signing statement as evidence of his disapproval of Congress’s action). The antiwar mid–to-late 70s was another dangerous time when the world perceived us as weak. Now we face another.

[NOTE: I have compared Obama to Hamlet several times, and rewritten Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy to fit his hesitations around military action. The first concerned Afghanistan in 2009; the second was about Syria in 2013. Still pretty good, if I do say so myself. I think they’re worth reading in their entirety, but this part of the 2013 version struck me as particularly pertinent today:

…who would tyrants bear,
To defy the red lines that he drew?
But that the dread of something afterward,
The unknown consequences in whose grip
A legacy might founder, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.”“Soft you now!
The fair MSM! Sycophants, in thy orisons
Be all my sins forgotten.

ISIS appears to be that dread “something afterward.”]

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It certainly won’t be easy to get at the truth and some accountability, because of the high probability that they’re all in on the corruption: not just Lerner and the IRS, but the DOJ, Obama, perhaps the FBI, and of course the MSM, which has barely been covering the story at all, as opposed to its furor over the missing minutes in the Nixon Watergate tapes.

Poor Nixon. If only he’d had the MSM on his side (which would only have happened had he been a Democrat), he—as a commenter here wrote—probably could have “burned the tapes, and then accused the other party of arson” and gotten away with it.

The depth and breadth of the government corruption in the IRS scandal makes me think of a memorable moment in the 1985 film “Witness”. It’s when the Harrison Ford character, who’s been fighting an enormous web of police corruption and has been reporting back to his trusted supervisor about it, has the dawning and horrific realization that the supervisor is also part of the conspiracy. It’s a searing scene as I recall it (I can’t locate a video clip, though, to check my memory), conveyed through Ford’s facial expression as he’s talking on the phone to the guy.

Although I saw the movie long before my political change, I think that sort of feeling of deep betrayal by a person or people you once trusted can be an integral part of the process of change. How many people in America are feeling that way now—and how many would be feeling that way if the MSM were to properly report the story?

[NOTE: Although I can’t find a clip of the scene, “Witness” is an excellent movie, in case you haven’t seen it. Here’s a different clip that deals with a different—but also fascinating—topic. Harrison Ford has been hiding out with the Amish after the Amish child Samuel has witnessed a violent murder while in the city. The gun here is Ford’s gun.

I’ve written about pacifism many times. The summary version of my viewpoint: too bad the bad guys won’t agree to be pacifists, too.

Another cinematic treatment of the same question occurs towards the end of another wonderful movie, “High Noon.” Grace Kelly, Will Kane’s Quaker wife, has to make a similar decision. She decides that she knows who the bad guys are.]

The post Losing trust appeared first on The New Neo.

[Popper] remembers that, although he was obviously dissatisfied with the society of its times, he was uneasy because the party obviously promoted a kind of murderous instinct against class-enemies: he was told, however, that this was necessary and that, in any case, it was not meant too seriously; also that in a revolution only victory can serve; and finally that under capitalism there are every day more victims than in the entire revolution. Popper notes that he agreed reluctantly, with the feeling that he had to pay a high price regarding his morality. Something similar happened regarding lies, as the leaders sometimes said one day white and the following day black; this would happen whenever they received a telegram from Moscow with the corresponding indications. When Popper protested, he was told that those contradictions were necessary and should not be criticized, as the unity of the party was essential for the triumph of revolution: although it was possible to commit mistakes, it was not allowed to criticize them openly, because only the discipline of the party could carry a fast victory. Popper remembers again that, although he reluctantly accepted this, he felt that he was sacrificing his personal integrity to the party, and that, when he realized that the leaders were disposed to contradict themselves at any moment, his attitude towards communism suffered a crisis

This is familiar, isn’t it? The slavish devotion to the Party over all, including rationality, was required. Young as he was at the time (age 17), Popper had trouble believing that 2 + 2 = 5, even when the Party demanded it.

The incident that was Popper’s turning point was a demonstration organized by the Communists, in which he took part and where quite a few people were killed by the police. He later wrote:

“I felt that as a Marxist I bore part of the responsibility for the tragedy -at least in principle. Marxist theory demands that the class struggle be intensified, in order to speed up the coming of socialism…”

…[T]he people dead, at least some of them, were young workers: Popper thought that other people who, like himself, were students or intellectuals, had special responsibility for those workers, who relied on the intellectuals. The other is that, as he said many years later, he had approved of the demonstration because it was supported by the communist party; he perhaps had even encouraged the participation of other people; and perhaps some of them were among the dead.

He was also upset by the attitude of the communist leaders. He asked himself whether he had discussed seriously and critically the Marxist theory which served as the basis for the sacrifice of human lives, and he recognized that he had not done it. However, when he arrived at the headquarters of the communist party, he realized that the leaders had an entirely different attitude: revolution made unavoidable the existence of such a type of victims, and furthermore this meant a kind of progress because workers would become every time more angry against the police and so they would become more and more aware of their real class-enemies. Popper’s reaction was clear: he never returned there, and this way, as he commented later, he escaped the Marxist trap…

…[H]e described it in his autobiography this way:

“I was shocked to have to admit to myself that not only had I accepted a complex theory somewhat uncritically, but I had also actually noticed quite a bit that was wrong, in the theory as well as in the practice of communism, but had repressed this -partly out of loyalty to “the cause”, and partly because there is a mechanism of getting oneself more and more deeply involved: once one has sacrificed one’s intellectual conscience over a minor point one does not wish to give up too easily; one wishes to justify the self-sacrifice by convincing oneself of the fundamental goodness of the cause, which is seen to outweigh any little moral or intellectual compromise that may be required. With every such moral or intellectual sacrifice one gets more deeply involved. One becomes ready to back one’s moral or intellectual investments in the cause with further investments. It is like being eager to throw good money after bad. I also saw how this mechanism had been working in my case, and I was horrified.”

I don’t think I’ve come across a better description of the thought process of one type of person who is often attracted to leftism: the idealist. Popper, a supremely rational man, also hated war and was attracted to what he perceived as the pacifism of the Communists (they weren’t really pacifists, but he didn’t know that at the time). For a while, then, as a teenaged activist, his desire to believe he was joining in a good cause trumped his rationality and his ethics, but soon both asserted themselves because they were so strong within him.

But it’s easy to see how other idealists, less rational and less ethical, could keep going for a long time in the Communist cause. And of course idealists are not the only people attracted to the left—there’s an entire group, among them usually the leaders, who are attracted not in spite of the cruelty and power but because of it.

The experience formed the basis of what became Popper’s life work:

This sufficed to make of Popper a fallibilist, strongly suspicious of pseudo-scientific creeds: the Marxist pseudo-scientific prediction of a necessary course of history was very dangerous, and the first condition that Popper would require in the future to any allegedly scientific theory was that it should be held with an attitude of intellectual modesty, namely an attitude that recognizes the magnitude of our ignorance and never forgets that our theories are always tentative and partial trials to progress. Scientific certainty had showed itself deceptive and should be replaced by an attitude of learning through our unavoidable mistakes. Now, mistakes would begin to be considered not as an evil, but as the way which prepares real progress.

The post Karl Popper, changer appeared first on The New Neo.

Limiting the power his successors can wield is, for Obama, not just an unalloyed good idea but an imperative. Call it the “stop America before my successors sin again” imperative.

Obama has always played the long game. That’s part of what Obamacare is all about, and it’s not over yet; there are more twistings and turnings in that story, including the single payer goal.

True, also, of these changes in our military capability. Obama is not content to draw down our capacity to wage war while he’s president. His goal is to extend his reach into the future and make it very difficult for whoever follows him—if that person be so inclined—to reverse the trend. He also wishes to signal his stance unequivocally to the world at large: the withdrawal of the US as the main military enforcer of order in the world.

I’ve written before (don’t have time to find the link at the moment) that Obama’s foreign policy has already caused other countries to see the US as less steadfast, and this holds true even if the next president is a conservative foreign policy hawk. American foreign policy has always been relatively stable and reliable. No matter who was president, there has been a general tendency to stand by allies and go against enemies, although the degree to which these things have been done varied.

Obama has already changed that game. The world knows that if there could be one president who reverses those rules there can be more, and America no longer can be relied upon.

So this proposed reduction in arms is part of that big picture. A future president who would want to reverse this would need the support of Congress, and time. That was part of England’s difficulty during the Chamberlain years—the Prime Minister was, among other things, playing for time because England was unready to fight the Nazi menace, even had it been willing.

Sometimes I wonder how much Obama knows about history. But mostly I think he knows the history he needs to know all too well.

[NOTE: This proposal would not fly if it didn’t tap into a generalized unwillingness on the part of the American public to understand that waging war is not necessarily bloodthirsty warmongering. Most people hate war—I include myself in that group—and many people seem to think it now unnecessary. This feeling has been building since the Vietnam War, and if it continues it will make it nearly impossible for us to defend ourselves or others. Its parallel in private life has to do with the desire to ban guns, as though that would solve the problem of guns in the hands of criminals rather than just give those criminals more and more power.

By the way, a personal note: some of my Communist and pro-Communist relatives were in the forefront of the nuclear disarmament (unilateral, of course!) movement while I was growing up. So I am well aware of the historic influence of the left on these movements, from personal experience.]

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It’s not true, at least at the moment, but it stands a remote possibility of becoming true. The facts are here and here, and are based on the Muslim prohibition against insurance, plus a provision in the Obamacare bill that exempts people from the requirement who have religious objections and come under a particular section of the IRS code that requires not only an organized objection but a refusal to accept the benefits of Social Security (which is the previous area in which the rule has been applied, mostly for Amish and Mennonites but never for Muslims).

So most interpretations have claimed that Muslims would not be exempt from Obamacare, either. And although SCOTUS has become a bit less predictable lately than in the past, so that we can safely say “you never know,” my strong suspicion is that the law will continue to be applied in the same way it has before, and only the aforementioned sort of groups would be exempt if they requested it.

This brings up another question: how far should religious exemptions go? How much adherence to our cultural and legal norms is required, and how much deviation allowed?

In this country we guarantee religious freedom, but only up to a point. That point is certainly exceeded by certain basic acts prohibited by criminal law: for example, if there were a sect that wanted to revive the Aztec religion and practice ritual sacrifice in which living humans had their hearts torn out of their chests, it would be outlawed despite their right to religious freedom. Members of the sect of renegade Mormons practicing polygamy are sometimes prosecuted for it, and there are animal rights advocates who would like to make the slaughtering of animals under kosher and/or halal laws a criminal offense. We have even seen that in one recent German court, circumcision has been ruled illegal.

The US has a lengthy tradition of allowing conscientious objectors to opt out of military service when there’s a draft, but only if they are members of a religious group such as the Quakers who are against such things on religious grounds (see my series on the Quakers and pacifism, here). However, in 1971, a case known as Gillette v. United States broadened those grounds and made the general category “conscience” an excuse to be exempted from service as well, under certain circumstances. Here’s how the situation stands today:

In the United States, there are two main criteria for classification as a conscientious objector. First, the objector must be opposed to war in any form, Gillette v. United States, 401 U.S. 437. Second, the objection must be sincere, Witmer v. United States, 348 U.S. 375. That he must show that this opposition is based upon religious training and belief was no longer a criterion after cases broadened it to include non-religious moral belief…

Military conscription ended in the US in 1973, and so this sort of thing is no longer front page news. But you can bet it would become a hot button issue again in the unlikely but conceivable circumstance of a re-institution of the draft.

The post Religious exemptions: from Obamacare and more appeared first on The New Neo.

She was political, too, as poets sometimes are. She opposed the First World War and picketed against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

But something happened to her right before World War II. During the late Thirties, she became alarmed, enraged, and activated by what was happening in Europe, including the appeasement that led to the fall of Czechoslavakia, and the anti-Semitism of Kristalnacht. Millay was moved to speak out publicly and loudly [the following excerpt is taken from the Millay biography by Nancy Milford, entitled Savage Beauty]:

I used to be a most ardent pacifist, but my mind has been changed. I am afraid the only hope of saving democracy is to fight for it…[There are people in power who are] not human beings in the sense that we have been brought up to understand that term. We have beasts in control of human beings. I am not speaking of the German people themselves, but if we have a wild animal to deal with we cannot be pacifists forever. Whatever we do, we cannot keep aloof from the general world situation, and it would be silly to think we can.

Words such as those were not going to sit well with the crew Millay usually hung out with. But in living her rather shocking life until then (lots of sex with men and women, inside and outside of marriage), courage is one thing Millay always had in abundance. She showed it now by stating:

Persons who begin writing lyric poetry at a young age are deeply concerned with themselves…As they mature, they begin to grow out of themselves and they feel a concern for others. Lyric poets who continue writing lyric poetry are likely to go into a dry rot and just say the same thing over and over again.

One impulse motivating Millay seems to have been a fear for the end of freedom of speech, a right she prized highly. She correctly saw that freedom as being imperiled far more by the threat from without than from within. The following passages from the Milford book concern a radio broadcast Millay made in October of 1939:

What we had to fear most, she said, was the menace of the “most loyal and idealistic Communist, and the most loyal and idealistic Fascist.” If we love democracy, then “We must love it in England and France. In Germany we must love it, if only we could find it there”—and here she paused for a long time—“but we have not found it there.”

Millay added:

Why, then, should we be so afraid to say that as regards the war between a Germany whose political philosophy is repugnant to us and an allied Britain and France whose concepts of civilized living are so closely akin to our own that we hope with all our hearts that Great Britain and France may win this war and Germany lose? [We must avail ourselves] as partiotic Americans, of this fine free speech of ours.

Her 1942 poem “The Murder of Lidice” was highly controversial, and many of her friends were highly critical—not just of its poetic value (I have no way to judge this, not having read it) but of its politics. No surprise there; we’ve seen this sort of thing before and since. Merle Rubin noted, “She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism.” And in his journal, her old friend Arthur Ficke wrote:

…this is so bad for her, so false to her real nature…

As a lyric poet, she was superb, unsurpassable…I cannot, I will not, believe that this war is an ultimate conflict between right and wrong: and although I do not doubt for a moment that we are less horrible than the philosophy and practice of Hitler, still I think we are very horrible: and I will not, I must not, accept or express the hysterical patriotic war-moods of these awful days.

This was written in 1942, in the middle of the horror of World War II. It’s the familiar typical stuff; the difference is that, today, most poets would probably say we are more horrible. But after all, this was the Nazis Ficke was talking about. And still, still, this poet called those such as Millay “hysterical,” a practitioner of kneejerk patriotic jingoism rather a clear-sighted observer of an intense conflict between morality and immorality.

The post Edna St. Vincent Millay, political changer appeared first on The New Neo.

You’ve also seen discussions of why those sporting them are incorrect; war has solved some things and provided answers to certain questions—such as whether, for example, there would be a 1000-year Reich.

I’ve spent some time puzzling over the use of the “war is not the answer” mantra. For some people—the less thoughtful—I think it’s merely a kneejerk catch phrase, a method to decorate a car in a way that says, “I’m a good person, not a bloodthirsty sonofabitch like those who advocate war.” This group (and I have no idea what percentage of the whole it might represent) has no particular understanding of history, especially the history of warfare, and no real thought about the limitations of the perfectibility of human nature.

And then there are those who really don’t have much interest in pacifism, but have an ultra-Leftist political agenda that an alliance with pacifists serves. These people see pacifists as a subset of the category “useful idiots” that they’ve found so very helpful over time.

That leaves us with the third category, the one that interests me most, the committed and relatively thoughtful and well-meaning people who sustain a hope that, although war will sometimes happen, they can promote a set of programs that will lead to a world in which war will be resorted to less and less. I will summarize their position by saying that, although they understand that war sometimes has provided short-term answers to certain questions (such as the one posited above about the Third Reich), it has never provided a long-term answer to the problem of human intra-species aggression on a large scale, and each war has introduced new problems in its wake that lead to further war.

In other words, when members of this third group say “War is not the answer” their accent is on the word “the.” War isn’t not the final answer to the problems of human conflict, and although it may appear to solve some things, other problems are bound to arise that will lead to future wars.

Well, excuse me but: duh. Or to put it more politely: there are no solutions to the problem of human conflict that will eliminate the need for force at times, just as there are virtually no large-scale societies that can do away with police or prisons.

The advent of the atomic age gave pacifists—and their hopes for a way to end war—a boost, and understandably so. As dreadful as war has been in the first half of the twentieth century, with the invention of nuclear weapons it became far worse to contemplate. Early on in the atomic age the hope was that nations would be sane enough that the prospect of mutually assured destruction would be a powerful deterrent to any war, and that therefore—paradoxically—the very power of the weapons would be the reason they were unlikely to be used in the future.

Amazingly enough, so far that hope has been borne out; Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still both the first and the last times nuclear weapons have actually been detonated on a populace.

But that does not mean war has ended; sub-atomic conflicts have regularly sprung up around the world, and many of those are presently of the asymmetrical variety, involving terrorism and/or guerilla warfare and insurgencies. Another common type of war in recent times has been the internecine inter-tribal, inter-ethnic, and/or inter-religious conflicts of the third world, particularly Africa.

As for nuclear weapons, unfortunately they have recently become tools that seem more likely to be used. We now have an enemy who is less obviously interested in life than in death, and motivated at least in part by apocalyptic religious thinking (example: Iran). We also have another and related enemy that is not a state and therefore has no nation of people to protect, would be difficult to trace a bomb back to, and is driven by the same aforementioned religious motivation and otherwordly emphasis, (examples: al Qaeda and its spawn).

All of this fuels the depth of the desire to find an alternative to war—an alternative that provides not only “an” answer, but “the” answer, in a way that war never can. If you go to websites that promote pacifism, such as this one run by a Quaker lobby, you’ll find attempts to explain what that alternative solution should be.

What you find there, of course, is not “the” answer, either. This is no surprise, because if you hold the more tragic (and, I believe, more realistic) view of human nature that I happen to, then you’re not looking for “the” answer, because you believe there never can be one.

There is really nothing so terribly wrong with the “solutions” offered there (except for reliance on the corrupt and/or incompetent UN), at least as far as they go, which isn’t all that far. The Quaker website stresses the idea of prevention, of nipping things in the bud before they ever get to that point. Nice idea, and I’m sure in some cases it works, but the programs described mostly focus on preventing one type of conflict, the so-called “mass humanitarian crises” such as the Rwandan slaughter. Although the role of the UN and NGOs in Darfur doesn’t indicate things have been going very well in this regard, there is some evidence of success (follow the link and scroll down to number four) in a very limited and circumscribed number of cases, none of which involve the so-called “war on terror” or Islamic totalitarianism.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Pope John Paul II negotiating a deal between Argentina and Chile over the Beagle Channel, or a social service society soothing the seething shantytowns of Ahmedabad in India through street plays and festivals—laudable though such things may be—aren’t about to give us “the answer” to the current question of what to do to counter the threat that militant Islamic fundamentalist totalitarianism represents now, including both its national and its terrorist manifestations.

Prevention is wonderful, and I’m all for it. It’s good to exercise aerobically, to eat healthfully, try to avoid carcinogens, and to get your vaccinations. The disease model dictates, however, that although an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, human beings rarely follow all the rules, and even those who do can end up with the shock of cancer or some other dread disease. When that happens, cure is worth many ounces of prevention, because prevention is no longer possible. And treatment must occur quickly.

Does that mean that someone who is diagnosed with cancer should give up practicing good health habits? Of course not; the two—prevention and treatment—work in tandem, and healthful practices can make treatment more effective. That’s why the “treatment” known as war does not preclude peace efforts such as those described on the Quaker website, as well.

War as a treatment? Yes—an exceptionally drastic one that should only be resorted to when there are no good alternatives, or when time has run out on the ones that might have worked in the past (the problem, of course, is deciding when that has happened). And like all drastic treatments it has many side effects, and can backfire and cause worse problems than those it attempts to address.

With war, every now and then there’s a cure, of course—World War II as a “cure” for Nazism, for example (although of course small pockets of that particular disease remain). But although World War II “cured” Nazism on a worldwide basis, the side effects were profound and devastating, and its aftermath fostered the growth of another already-existing disease: Communism.

Yes, indeed, war is not the answer to the problems that bring about armed conflict, and war is probably the least benign “treatment” on earth. But when prevention (and our very incomplete knowledge of how to accomplish it) has failed, sometimes it’s the only answer.

[ADDENDUM: In one of those examples of simultaneity in which the blogosphere is especially rich, Shrinkwrapped writes today on the psychological underpinnings of this sort of ultra-pacifist point of view.]

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The desire to get away is hardly surprising; the place has been mired in ever-escalating ruin and murder for quite some time now. I remain convinced that the majority of people (even Palestinian Muslims, who’ve been brainwashed into a cult of death and dying for a long time) still want to live and have a more pleasant experience while they’re about it. Emigrating from Palestine probably sounds like an excellent way to do that.

I’m also not surprised that the PA cleric issued a fatwa to try to stop them, although I have no idea how much he will be listened to. The prospect of the local population shrinking down to near-nothingness would be an interesting twist on the old saying, from “what if they gave a war and nobody came?” to “what if they gave a war and nobody stayed?”

The PA cleric’s admonition rang a bell with me, and I realized that sound emanated from what would appear to be an unlikely source: Gandhi. Yes, folks, that man of peace (whom I’ve written about at great length before, here), had a similar message in a similar time of civil war.

Of course, Gandhi’s motive was utterly different from that of the PA cleric; you might say it was the opposite. But the effect of his plea—if heeded—would have, strangely enough, been the same: to keep potentially victimized people from saving their own skins, and to what purpose?

Gandhi was speaking to Hindus on the occasion of the partition of India and Pakistan, an event marked by migrations and horrific violence on both sides. Gandhi, who had opposed partition, reacted in the following manner:

During [Gandhi’s] prayer meeting on 1 May 1947, he prepared the Hindus and Sikhs for the anticipated massacres of their kind in the upcoming state of Pakistan with these words: “I would tell the Hindus to face death cheerfully if the Muslims are out to kill them. I would be a real sinner if after being stabbed I wished in my last moment that my son should seek revenge. I must die without rancour. You may turn round and ask whether all Hindus and all Sikhs should die. Yes, I would say. Such martyrdom will not be in vain.” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol.LXXXVII, p.394-5) It is left unexplained what purpose would be served by this senseless and avoidable surrender to murder.

Even when the killing had started, Gandhi refused to take pity on the Hindu victims, much less to point fingers at the Pakistani aggressors. More importantly for the principle of non-violence, he failed to offer them a non-violent technique of countering and dissuading the murderers. Instead, he told the Hindu refugees from Pakistan to go back and die. On 6 August 1947, Gandhiji commented to Congress workers on the incipient communal conflagration in Lahore thus: “I am grieved to learn that people are running away from the West Punjab and I am told that Lahore is being evacuated by the non-Muslims. I must say that this is what it should not be. If you think Lahore is dead or is dying, do not run away from it, but die with what you think is the dying Lahore”¦

“Die with the dying Lahore” is a phrase that resonates with the ring of fanaticism. The PA mufti is also a fanatic, dedicated to an idea of war that is very different from Gandhi’s. Gandhi was a fanatic dedicated to an ideal of peace—but one that uses methods that run so counter to human nature it can never be realized on earth, and in the name of that dream he made suggestions that can only be described as insane.

Despite the desire of most people to continue living, human beings can—and regularly do—lay down their lives for a greater good. That is something we all applaud, and we call those people “heroes.” But there is nothing heroic in staying in a failed and miserable country being torn apart by a civil and/or gang war between corrupt and vicious leaders, just as there is nothing heroic in being asked to stay in a country to be slaughtered by marauding mobs. Fanatics will sometimes ask it of us, nevertheless.

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