There's no need to list the admirers: far too many and far too famous, or infamous, from Alexander through Genghis Khan to Napoleon and Hitler.
So this is mostly about the detractors. Butler Shaffer, whose columns appear on LRC, wrote on March 16, in "What Is Terrorism?": "There are no u2018noble' or u2018just' wars when the lives of millions of innocent men, women, and children are consumed in the slaughter."
Contemporary war admirers would take exception to that by at once instancing Word War II, wherein Hitler and his statist thugs slaughtered, among others, millions of Jews. (On the other side Stalin and his allies, Britain and the US, slaughtered their millions on the ground and from the air and with such post-hostility political horrors as Operation Keelhaul, that forcibly returned millions of anti-Communist Russians from the West to the tender mercies of FDR's Uncle Joe, not to speak of his pre-war murders of millions of Ukrainians denounced as "Kulaks" ("wealthy farmers," i.e. men who owned more than a couple of acres.)
But surely Hitler needed to be stopped? Yes, but he should have been stopped at home. I know, I know; you can't replay history, but you can learn from it.
I am an admirer and supporter of JPFO, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, a well-managed Second Amendment group that insistently urges today's US Jews, many of whom are vigorous and public anti-gunners like Senator Schumer of New York, to abandon their anti-gun mentality, and realize that the one, real, last-resort safeguard they have – we all have – in the United States, against the possible rise of a domestic Hitler, is the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which has given us the legal ownership of guns by 80-plus million men and women.
Imagine if the Jews of Hitler's Germany had had guns, even just old pistols and shotguns, and greeted the Polizei with hot lead when they came with their Black Marias to cart them away. Unimaginable? Not at all. The Warsaw ghetto uprising gives a hint.
And on the likely utility of providing firm, indeed abandoned, opposition to a tyrant's gendarmes (as well as the cost of failure to do so) hear Solzhenitsyn:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! "If. . . if . . . We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! . . . We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” (Note 5, page 13, Vol. 1, The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn)
You say all this is so much dithering in the face of Apache helicopters, etc.? I say not so, but only if we get back to the frame of mind of Patrick Henry and other such dim, old, historic, and heroic folk.
I have just spent an hour searching for some lines of Confucius that Ezra Pound quoted, but so far no luck. What I remember are these:
In the spring and autumn there are no righteous wars.
That is a much flatter statement than Butler Shaffer's, with which I began this piece. I think the great Tolstoy agreed; he was flamboyantly anti-war. Pound started his search into the reasons for World War I, which ultimately got him into so much trouble, because the war carried off so many of his young poet and artist friends, from whom he expected great things – not to mention so many millions of their potential audience. In the end he wrote (in a pretty wretched disillusionment) these lines from "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley":
Daring as never before, wastage as never before, Young blood and high blood Fair cheeks, and fine bodies; . . .
There died a myriad, And of the best among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization
Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.
I doubt these lines are studied in our high schools; I doubt that very many high schoolers even know that EP was our greatest or second greatest poet (depends how you value Whitman); probably few enough college grads have even a faint idea of anything about him. He had a way of being offensive to the powerful, as in these lines from the same poem:
Died some pro patria, Non "dulce" non "et décor" . . . walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy; usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places.
(When you bring up Pound in moderately educated circles you will be quickly filled in on his broadcasts on Mussolini's radio telling Americans to quit the war because they were only serving the bankers, i.e., "the Jews"; he admired Mussolini; he really did go on an extended, years-long rant about the iniquity of central bankers, a theme decidedly non-mainstream in the 30s and 40s although far less so now; and he had some thoroughly way-out views on economics and money. You may fail to hear that his prose writings on literature provide enchanting hours of reading, and his poetry is filled with exquisite wonders – all admittedly for the discriminating.)
But poetry (truth and beauty, remember?) and war are largely incompatible. There are exceptions, but not many, not even Homer, if you can believe some of the more penetrating critics. War is, in a word, hell.
So if you are going to offer hell to young men, and nowadays even women, you have to trick it out with glamour, decorate it with promises of great rewards (not excluding money and a college education), and make those old-men's lies as seductive as a high-price "vendor of words" can make them.
I have a vivid memory of an old man vs. young man contention about war going back to the early 40s, just after we entered WWII. The draft had begun, but at that point it was well known that there were not enough guns yet manufactured to equip the new recruits with a decent kit, so they marched and drilled with broom sticks. (I guess that was true, anyway it is an element in this story.)
At that time there was a brilliant, brash, and youngish scholar on deck at Harvard, one AHC, who was a friend of friends of my elder brother, part of a small group of older students and younger faculty who got together for bull sessions. C was a Bavarian and evidently heir to a title; he had been chucked out of Germany shortly before. He was indeed far too outspoken and individualist for the New Germany. He had become at that time a sort of faculty assistant, as I recall, at the Harvard Law School, where his expertise in medieval law was valued. (I heard that many years later he became head of a major medieval institute.)
This was either late '41 or early '42. Several of the Law School's distinguished professors were encouraging law students to consider entering the service immediately; it would, they said, further their future careers to be familiar with the sort of Americans who would be the rank and file of the military.
This enraged C, who had just got through opposing militarism in Germany, for which he was invited out by the Gestapo. A typical C remark: "The FBI is just like the Gestapo only less intelligent." This sort of thing (uttered after an encounter with the FBI) did not endear him to officialdom. And what got the Gestapo, er . . . the FBI, interested in him was his verbal assault on the professors who were advising their students to go to war: "What do you think is going to happen to them? Do you think you can turn over a bathtub and aim a broomstick gun through the hole in it and stand up against a 30-ton German tank?" Or words to that effect. And much more about the need to arm against a perfectly serious German threat and not pretend the war was going to be a social opportunity. And so on.
Of course the FBI suspected he might be a Nazi plant. It was not a good time to be a German and be stressing German strength. After much trouble, C convinced them he was not a Nazi. But he had one unholy amount of grief over it. And he would not give up expressing his outrage at comfortable professors, well past fighting age, urging young men on with hideous utilitarian reasons.
Well, I have remembered all that. And I find I am similarly outraged by the way people who are comfortably ensconced in cushy places now urge young people to go do the fighting and perhaps die, while at the same time resolutely failing to explore, or even be interested in, what changes might be made in our own land and to its policies that would contribute to a peaceful, that is, a diplomatic solution to current world exacerbations.
And what about the failure of people with stakes in international businesses like oil and munitions to recuse themselves from high-level government decision-making. Does it make sense to have oil men as Numero Uno and Numero Dos?
I do not mean to suggest conspiracy, merely that an oil man or a banker sees things differently than a poet or a priest, is less sensitive to things human, much more inclined to be instinctively rapacious, and much more inclined to justify the wastage of human beings in causes a high school kid could see need something very different.
Beware of old men's lies.
March 15, 2002
