There is very provocative and powerful rhetorical statement going around that goes like this:
Fighting for peace is rather like fucking for virginity
Taking this statement at face value, then it follows that going to war to defeat Hitler was a conceptually absurd thing to do. Likewise for the Civil War. This in turn shows the absurdity of the rhetorical statement. But this is to get ahead of ourselves.
Particularly good rhetorical statements have the character ringing obviously true even as one hears them. So there is no need for further reflection. The rhetorical statement above is a case in point.
The idea behind the statement, of course, is that it is conceptually impossible to achieve peace by way of war; hence, anyone who goes to war, in the hopes of attaining peace, is absolutely and utterly misguided. This is even a stronger statement than the thesis that all wars are unjust. For there is no conceptual incompatibility in saying that a war was wrong, but that as a matter fact something very good unexpectedly came out of that war; for there is no incompatibility at all in saying that something good can came out of an evil event that occurred.
Had there not been either the evil of American slavery or the evil of the Holocaust, there would not have been, respectively, Frederic Douglass or Elie Wiesel to enrich our thought in the ways that they did. Being a victim of evil is a form of adversity; and there are, in fact, lots of stories about people who have overcome extraordinary adversity.
But let us return to the rhetorical statement. The sense in which war is to peace what sex is to virginity is that doing the first (in each instance) conceptually excludes the second (in each instance). The difference, though, is that virginity once lost cannot possibly be regained; for nothing can change the fact that one has had a sexual experience; and by definition a virgin is one who has never had a sexual experience.
To be sure, it is true by definition that peace means the absence of war. What is false, however, is that peace once lost cannot be possibly be regained.
This undoes the supposed analogy. A person cannot intend to have sex and at the same time intend to do something later that will enable her or him to recover her or his virginity, since virginity is by definition a non-recoverable state of affairs. However, a person can intend to have war and at the same time intend to do something later that which will bring about a restoration of peace.
Peace is a restorable good, which is not the same thing as saying that once restored it will last forever.
I understand that war is rarely if ever a good thing. But I also understand that at times it has been necessary to go to war. Thus I find myself quite stunned by those who shout “No More War” as if this were a moral posture that one should decide to take regardless of whatever else transpires or as if any and all wars were utterly fruitless.
More importantly, I am angered by the disrespect that is engendered towards those who are serving in the armed services fighting the war in Iraq. It may very well be that the United States should not have lead a war against Iraq. But nothing whatsoever should blind us to the reality that people are sacrificing their lives.
I have heard people compare to George Bush to Hitler. Surely the more apt comparison is between Saddam Hussein and Hitler. My pain lies in the fact people use the Bush is Hitler ideology to be hostile towards men and women who are sacrificing their lives. The line of reasoning is clear: If Bush is comparable to Hitler, then soldiers fighting in the Iraq war are comparable to Nazis.
Needless to say, what we have here is an utterly fulsome comparison—a comparison that is none other than a form of evil itself, as any honest reflection upon the character of Nazism and what the United States set out to do in Iraq makes abundantly clear.
Accordingly, whatever opposition persons might have to the war, it should not blind them to the truth that people are sacrificing their lives. Nor should it blind them to the truth that fighting this war is not, whatever its faults might be, comparable to fighting in Hitler’s army.
Deep convictions are one thing; dogmatism is quite another. The two should never be confused. Far too many people take their utter intransigent attitude as proof of moral excellence and courage. Not so, however. Being obdurate is not a virtue in and of itself.
Dogmatism blinds us to the weal and woe of another no matter how transparent the suffering is and no matter how similar the suffering is to our own experiences. Dogmatism denies the reality of novel experiences or, in any case, experiences that require at least thinking one’s reviews and perhaps argue them anew. Dogmatism cannot see that sometimes a wrongdoing may not warrant blame.
The young people fighting in the armed serves should not be a victim of dogma.
We live in an era in which truth has become manifestly irrelevant. By that I mean that people say what they just have to know is unequivocally false. They do so in order to gain rhetorical advantage in order to gain political advantage.
However, I hold a very simple view: a posture that ignores genuine innocence is but a tool of evil. Innocence is not lost merely because we do not share the objective in question. And while objectives most certainly can be evil, we trample upon innocence when we wrongly describe an objective as analogous to a paradigm form evil. Moreover, we shatter trust by revealing that political gain is more important than truth.
I am reminded here of feminists who accuse all men of being rapists. As I have always said: I am prepared to acknowledge a wealth of untoward sentiments in my heart. Just so, there is the reality that I have exhibited sufficient control so as not to act on those sentiments that are morally ignoble. And I will not let anyone take that from me.
The untarnished truth is that many soldier serving in Iraq have chosen to do so in the hopes of bringing about a better world—not in Hitler’s sense of racial superiority—but in the sense of a freer world for all. That hope is noble even if its implementation leaves something to be desired. Not only that, the hope is not tied to a warped and distorted view of any group of people. This should be more than sufficient for us to honor those who sacrifice themselves in the armed services.
The media would paint Cindy Sheehan as a brave and courageous woman—a real hero. Nothing of the sort is true. She has used her personal tragedy as a license to distort the truth and slander others, all the while basking in the attention of the media. She is no more the Rosa Parks of the Iraq war than I am of the town of Syracuse.
But I mentioned her not to lambaste her but to remind us all that the real heroes are those who believed in a noble idea, not tied to diminishing others, and who have willingly sacrificed their lives for it without ever giving being motivated by the thought of gaining media attention.
In my Book of Heroes, every single individual lived an exemplary moral life and, while doing so, unexpectedly became the object of the public’s attention. Never the other around. Most soldiers fighting in the Iraq war are much more like that than not. And we should never lose sight of that truth.
