Give Peace a Chance

The older I get the worse I think war is and the more obvious it is that very, very few wars are necessary evils or better than the alternative. 

I am reluctant to disagree with Robert Tombs, who is a genius and who supervised me at Cambridge, but  the two World Wars and possibly the wars against Napoleon (I haven't studied the Napoleonic wars) in hindsight may well fall into the category of unnecessary. The Crimean War, the English and US Civil Wars and the two Boer Wars obviously do.

I am most pacifist about revolutions and especially the American, French, Russian and Iranian ones.

But I am not a pacifist. There are just wars and war is a necessary evil. America was right to bomb Hiroshima (not Nagasaki). 

In my time, the Falklands War and the first (contra Edward Heath and Denis Healey) but not the second Iraq War were just. 

I doubt now if the Kosovan War was. I supported it at the time. I wanted what used to be called 'the Powers' to intervene in the Bosnian War, while Simon Heffer and his mentor Enoch Powell were opposed to interventions in the former Yugoslavia. At the time I was very opposed to that point of view, but now am no longer quite so sure. 

The Pope's new encyclical Tutti Frutti Fratelli Tutti, which was promulgated or published or whatever happens to encyclicals yesterday, says

It is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war'.

Yet Pope Francis is an admirer of Abraham Lincoln, whose war against the South cost 700,000 lives all told, including people who died of disease, and he wanted Hillary Clinton to become President even though she had promised that regime change in Syria would be her top priority.

Here are some other opinions about pacifism.

Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous coloured races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars...

Oswald Spengler

 

That Europe was still Christian except for its Jews, privileged survivors when the pagans were exterminated, but its very un-Christian central ideology was the Iliad’s: men love war, women love warriors. European wars over the centuries were fought by volunteers, whose urge to fight was far more widely admired than deplored, not least by women desirous of virile mates.

...As for the post-heroic ideas that have largely displaced the Iliad’s elemental prescriptions, they are varied and changeable and drifting right-ward of late, but among the better-educated anti-racism, feminism, post-colonial guilt, and a pacifist presumption remain the dominant mix, perhaps best exemplified by the Norwegian politician Karsten Nordal Hauken. In both a TV appearance and an April 6, 2016 article, Hauken proclaimed his own strong feelings of guilt and responsibility, because a male Somali asylum-seeker was being deported after serving four-and-a-half years in prison for rape: “I was the reason that he would not be in Norway anymore but rather sent to a dark, uncertain future in Somalia. … I see him mostly as a product of an unfair world, a product of an upbringing marked by war and despair.”

Hauken’s guilty plea may seem strange because he did not capture, prosecute, or judge the Somali. Yet there can be no doubt about his personal connection to the case: Karsten Nordal Hauken, self-described as “male, heterosexual, young Socialist Left Party member, feminist and anti-racist” was himself the object of the rape.”

Edward Luttwak in a fine essay in the Tablet, the American Jewish magazine, not the British (supposedly) Catholic one.

 

Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact. If the white races are resolved never to wage war again, the coloured will act differently and become rulers of the world.
Oswald Spengler

 

To state the liberal qualities, the manly wisdom, the public virtue, of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, has been a favourite employment for declamation in a certain noisy assembly. Such declamation shows a deplorable ignorance of their character, their history, their institutions. They were neither liberal nor just; they were neither wise nor virtuous. On the contrary, every remaining record proves that they were at once the most barbarous, the most selfish, the most bloodthirsty, unjust, odious, and yet despicable, of the European nations; that they were destitute of all virtue, public or private. How such a horde of lawless savages contrived to escape mutual destruction by the violence or perfidy of each other, is a problem of impracticable solution. S.A. Dunham, A History of Europe During the Middle Ages (1834)

 

I am a pacifist, but be aware that I also carry a gun.
M.F. Moonzajer

 

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
Hilaire Belloc