The
Pope Flirts With Blanket Condemnation Of War:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1388183/posts|
The Failure of War
|
|
by Wendell Berry
|
|
If you know even as little history as I
do, it is hard not to doubt the efficacy of modern war as a solution to any
problem except that of retribution—the “justice” of exchanging one damage for
another.
Apologists for war will insist that war
answers the problem of national self-defense. But the doubter, in reply, will
ask to what extent the cost even of a successful war of national defense—in
life, money, material, foods, health, and (inevitably) freedom—may amount to
a national defeat. National defense through war always involves some degree
of national defeat. This paradox has been with us from the very beginning of
our republic. Militarization in defense of freedom reduces the freedom of the
defenders. There is a fundamental inconsistency between war and freedom.
In a modern war, fought with modern
weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the
damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to
know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it.
Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without
killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy
without damaging yourself.
That many have considered the
increasing unacceptability of modern warfare is shown by the language of the
propaganda surrounding it. Modern wars have characteristically been fought to
end war; they have been fought in the name of peace. Our most terrible
weapons have been made, ostensibly, to preserve and assure the peace of the
world. “All we want is peace,” we say as we increase relentlessly our
capacity to make war.
Yet at the end of a century in which we
have fought two wars to end war and several more to prevent war and preserve
peace, and in which scientific and technological progress has made war ever
more terrible and less controllable, we still, by policy, give no
consideration to nonviolent means of national defense. We do indeed make much
of diplomacy and diplomatic relations, but by diplomacy we mean invariably
ultimatums for peace backed by the threat of war. It is always understood
that we stand ready to kill those with whom we are “peacefully negotiating.”
Our century of war, militarism, and
political terror has produced great—and successful—advocates of true peace,
among whom Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the paramount
examples. The considerable success that they achieved testifies to the
presence, in the midst of violence, of an authentic and powerful desire for
peace and, more important, of the proven will to make the necessary
sacrifices. But so far as our government is concerned, these men and their
great and authenticating accomplishments might as well never have existed. To
achieve peace by peaceable means is not yet our goal. We cling to the
hopeless paradox of making peace by making war.
Which is to say that we cling in our
public life to a brutal hypocrisy. In our century of almost universal
violence of humans against fellow humans, and against our natural and
cultural commonwealth, hypocrisy has been inescapable because our opposition
to violence has been selective or merely fashionable. Some of us who approve
of our monstrous military budget and our peacekeeping wars nonetheless
deplore “domestic violence” and think that our society can be pacified by
“gun control.” Some of us are against capital punishment but for abortion.
Some of us are against abortion but for capital punishment.
One does not have to know very much or
think very far in order to see the moral absurdity upon which we have erected
our sanctioned enterprises of violence. Abortion-as-birth-control is
justified as a “right,” which can establish itself only by denying all the
rights of another person, which is the most primitive intent of warfare.
Capital punishment sinks us all to the same level of primal belligerence, at
which an act of violence is avenged by another act of violence.
What the justifiers of these acts
ignore is the fact—well-established by the history of feuds, let alone the
history of war—that violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in
“justice” or in affirmation of “rights” or in defense of “peace” do not end
violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.
The most dangerous superstition of the
parties of violence is the idea that sanctioned violence can prevent or
control unsanctioned violence. But if violence is “just” in one instance as
determined by the state, why might it not also be “just” in another instance,
as determined by an individual? How can a society that justifies capital
punishment and warfare prevent its justifications from being extended to
assassination and terrorism? If a government perceives that some causes are
so important as to justify the killing of children, how can it hope to
prevent the contagion of its logic spreading to its citizens—or to its
citizens’ children?
If we give to these small absurdities
the magnitude of international relations, we produce, unsurprisingly, some
much larger absurdities. What could be more absurd, to begin with, than our
attitude of high moral outrage against other nations for manufacturing the
selfsame weapons that we manufacture? The difference, as our leaders say, is
that we will use these weapons virtuously, whereas our enemies will use them
maliciously—a proposition that too readily conforms to a proposition of much
less dignity: we will use them in our interest, whereas our enemies will use
them in theirs.
Or we must say, at least, that the
issue of virtue in war is as obscure, ambiguous, and troubling as Abraham
Lincoln found to be the issue of prayer in war: “Both [the North and the
South] read the same bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes his
aid against the other… The prayers of both could not be answered — that of
neither could be answered fully.”
Recent American wars, having been both
“foreign” and “limited,” have been fought under the assumption that little or
no personal sacrifice is required. In “foreign” wars, we do not directly
experience the damage that we inflict upon the enemy. We hear and see this
damage reported in the news, but we are not affected. These limited,
“foreign” wars require that some of our young people should be killed or
crippled, and that some families should grieve, but these “casualties” are so
widely distributed among our population as hardly to be noticed.
Otherwise, we do not feel ourselves to
be involved. We pay taxes to support the war, but that is nothing new, for we
pay war taxes also in time of “peace.” We experience no shortages, we suffer
no rationing, we endure no limitations. We earn, borrow, spend, and consume
in wartime as in peacetime.
And of course no sacrifice is required
of those large economic interests that now principally constitute our
economy. No corporation will be required to submit to any limitation or to
sacrifice a dollar. On the contrary, war is the great cure-all and
opportunity of our corporate economy, which subsists and thrives upon war.
War ended the Great Depression of the 1930s, and we have maintained a war
economy—an economy, one might justly say, of general violence—ever since,
sacrificing to it an enormous economic and ecological wealth, including, as
designated victims, the farmers and the industrial working class.
And so great costs are involved in our
fixation on war, but the costs are “externalized” as “acceptable losses.” And
here we see how progress in war, progress in technology, and progress in the
industrial economy are parallel to one another—or, very often, are merely
identical.
Romantic nationalists, which is to say
most apologists for war, always imply in their public speeches a mathematics
or an accounting of war. Thus by its suffering in the Civil War, the North is
said to have “paid for” the emancipation of the slaves and the preservation
of the Union. Thus we may speak of our liberty as having been “bought” by the
bloodshed of patriots. I am fully aware of the truth in such statements. I
know that I am one of many who have benefited from painful sacrifices made by
other people, and I would not like to be ungrateful. Moreover, I am a patriot
myself and I know that the time may come for any of us when we must make
extreme sacrifices for the sake of liberty—a fact confirmed by the fates of
Gandhi and King.
But still I am suspicious of this kind
of accounting. For one reason, it is necessarily done by the living on behalf
of the dead. And I think we must be careful about too easily accepting, or
being too easily grateful for, sacrifices made by others, especially if we
have made none ourselves. For another reason, though our leaders in war
always assume that there is an acceptable price, there is never a previously
stated level of acceptability. The acceptable price, finally, is whatever is
paid.
It is easy to see the similarity
between this accounting of the price of war and our usual accounting of “the
price of progress.” We seem to have agreed that whatever has been (or will
be) paid for so-called progress is an acceptable price. If that price
includes the diminishment of privacy and the increase of government secrecy,
so be it. If it means a radical reduction in the number of small businesses
and the virtual destruction of the farm population, so be it. If it means the
devastation of whole regions by extractive industries, so be it. If it means
that a mere handful of people should own more billions of wealth than is
owned by all of the world’s poor, so be it.
But let us have the candor to
acknowledge that what we call “the economy” or “the free market” is less and
less distinguishable from warfare. For about half of the last century, we
worried about world conquest by international communism. Now with less worry
(so far) we are witnessing world conquest by international capitalism.
Though its political means are milder
(so far) than those of communism, this newly internationalized capitalism may
prove even more destructive of human cultures and communities, of freedom,
and of nature. Its tendency is just as much toward total dominance and
control. Confronting this conquest, ratified and licensed by the new
international trade agreements, no place and no community in the world may
consider itself safe from some form of plunder. More and more people all over
the world are recognizing that this is so, and they are saying that world
conquest of any kind is wrong, period.
They are doing more than that. They are
saying that local conquest also is wrong, and wherever it is taking place
local people are joining together to oppose it. All over my own state of
Kentucky this opposition is growing—from the west, where the exiled people of
the Land Between the Lakes are struggling to save their homeland from
bureaucratic depredation, to the east, where the native people of the
mountains are still struggling to preserve their land from destruction by
absentee corporations.
To have an economy that is warlike,
that aims at conquest and that destroys virtually everything that it is
dependent on, placing no value on the health of nature or of human
communities, is absurd enough. It is even more absurd that this economy, that
in some respects is so much at one with our military industries and programs,
is in other respects directly in conflict with our professed aim of national
defense.
It seems only reasonable, only sane, to
suppose that a gigantic program of preparedness for national defense should
be founded first of all upon a principle of national and even regional
economic independence. A nation determined to defend itself and its freedoms
should be prepared, and always preparing, to live from its own resources and
from the work and the skills of its own people. But that is not what we are
doing in the United States today. What we are doing is squandering in the
most prodigal manner the natural and human resources of the nation.
At present, in the face of declining
finite sources of fossil fuel energies, we have virtually no energy policy,
either for conservation or for the development of safe and clean alternative
sources. At present, our energy policy simply is to use all that we have.
Moreover, in the face of a growing population needing to be fed, we have
virtually no policy for land conservation and no policy of just compensation
to the primary producers of food. Our agricultural policy is to use up
everything that we have, while depending increasingly on imported food, energy,
technology, and labor.
Those are just two examples of our
general indifference to our own needs. We thus are elaborating a surely
dangerous contradiction between our militant nationalism and our espousal of
the international “free market” ideology. How do we escape from this
absurdity?
I don’t think there is an easy answer.
Obviously, we would be less absurd if we took better care of things. We would
be less absurd if we founded our public policies upon an honest description
of our needs and our predicament, rather than upon fantastical descriptions
of our wishes. We would be less absurd if our leaders would consider in good
faith the proven alternatives to violence.
Such things are easy to say, but we are
disposed, somewhat by culture and somewhat by nature, to solve our problems
by violence, and even to enjoy doing so. And yet by now all of us must at
least have suspected that our right to live, to be free, and to be at peace
is not guaranteed by any act of violence. It can be guaranteed only by our
willingness that all other persons should live, be free, and be at peace—and
by our willingness to use or give our own lives to make that possible. To be
incapable of such willingness is merely to resign ourselves to the absurdity
we are in; and yet, if you are like me, you are unsure to what extent you are
capable of it.
Here is the other question that I have
been leading toward, one that the predicament of modern warfare forces upon
us: How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are
we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly)
at peace? To that question I answer: None. Please, no children. Don’t kill
any children for my benefit.
If that is your answer too, then you
must know that we have not come to rest, far from it. For surely we must feel
ourselves swarmed about with more questions that are urgent, personal, and
intimidating. But perhaps also we feel ourselves beginning to be free, facing
at last in our own selves the greatest challenge ever laid before us, the
most comprehensive vision of human progress, the best advice, and the least
obeyed:
“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”
Wendell Berry, poet,
philosopher, and conservationist, farms in Kentucky.
© Wendell Berry
|
No comments:
Post a Comment