Anti-War Advocates, America and Israel
By Bruce Walker (06/02/08)
As the so-called anti-war movement in America behaves like ill-mannered preschoolers on college campuses, in municipal governments in Marxist areas of California, and in cruel actions against the families of those who fight to protect us, we should examine more closely just what this anti-war movement really reflects.
Is anti-war some sort of anti-violence movement? Is it pacifism stretched to its farthest rational boundaries? What is pacifism? It is plain silliness. Begin with life at its lowest level and consider how hopeless the case of cosmic pacifism. When I have an infection, my doctor gives me an anti-biotic. This starts a war between armies of organisms within my body. I begin the process of murdering many millions of harmful germs so that I may become well. Even when children are immunized against diseases, this, too, is the beginning of an aggressive war against unwanted microorganisms. What if my cosmic pacifism reaches so deeply that I will not see a doctor or take my child to a doctor? It does not matter. Without my consent, over my conscious objection, my body will fight a long, deadly war against diseases it confronts. Life, almost by definition, is a battle against other life. Even vegetarians kill and eat other life to live.
What our immune system does, our animal natures do too. Nature is not pacifistic. Many species of animals are born predators. The wolf killing sheep is not evil, but normal. This is not because we accept the pernicious Darwinian “survival of the fittest” but rather because the necessary slaughter is part of the natural condition of life. Animals killing and eating meat is a necessity of life.
Humans, however, may act with malice or mercy. So while I eat my hamburger, I can be repulsed by people who torment cattle. Anyone who has worked a farm knows that the farmer or rancher does not hate his herd. He typically feels affection and concern for these animals. He calls the vet when they are sick. If they are sick beyond hope, he puts them out of their misery. He helps bring them into the world, and he helps take them out of the world. But he does so with respect and affection, with compassion and concern.
This is at the center of Judeo-Christian tradition. Judaism prescribes a certain method of slaughtering animals for food, and that method deliberately reduces the pain in death to much less than what an animal dying a natural death would suffer. Christianity was the first world religion to expressly adopt laws prohibiting cruelty to any animals. Compassion toward life is not inconsistent with using the lives of animals to improve the life of man.
What about pacifists who are not the cosmic PETA pacifists? What about those people who oppose all violence by humans against humans. How consistent are they? Would these people use force (violence) to prevent their infant from walking into a fire or drinking poison? Would they grab a brother who was about to jump off a high building? Using force must be different from using violence.
Even those humans who profess doing no violence to any human must consider what this means. Would they fight someone torturing their child? Would they slug someone who was about to set off a nuclear weapon in their town? Would their respect for the preservation of human life overcome their interest in never using violence? A stand against violence against all other humans rests on very rickety rhetoric and almost no one can or should live like that.
Gandhi, the archetype of such pacifism, did not practice nonviolence. He approved of the slaughter of ten Moslem innocents in India in retaliation for the murder of one Hindu. Gandhi also suggesting that Jews trapped in the Hell of the Holocaust commit suicide as a way of pricking the unconscionable consciences of Heydrich, Himmler and Hitler.
Pacifists who object to the taking of human life, but this are inconsistent. Do anti-war activists oppose abortion? If they do, they do it invisibly and silently. Yet are not these most innocent entitled to more protection against violence than, say, al-Qaida terrorists who have chosen murder and mayhem of ordinary civilian populations? Is Cindy Sheehan protesting outside abortion clinics? No.
So if even the murder of innocent humans, albeit in the womb, is acceptable to anti-war protestors, then what is their gripe? It appears to be that organized violence against individuals by states which we call war. But there is no fine line between formal war – when is the last time any nation declared war on another? – and organized violence. The American patriots and the Confederates both sought to be considered at war, rather than simply in rebellion. So, also, Palestinians and al-Qaida who routinely inflict on innocent Israeli and Iraqi citizens consider themselves at war with Israel and America. Is fighting a war in which we are warred upon immoral? How can a war be ended which is become by our enemies? It cannot, except by victory or peace treaty, both of which our enemies reject.
Yet those who oppose American and Israeli actions of self-defense often hide behind the slogan “anti-war.” Yet what does this term really mean? A universal opposition to war would mean an opposition to all war everywhere by everyone. Yet the Cindy Sheehan types do not go to Iran and protest that nation’s support of war in Iraq. They do not go to Sri Lanka to protest that nation’s long, bloody civil war. They concern themselves, almost entirely, with the American and Israeli military forces fighting back.
This selective indignation conflicts with any “universal” objection to war. It is only war conducted by good nations which troubles them. These sorts of “anti-war” agitators are not concerned with all wars that their nation wages, just with some wars. Cindy Sheehan or her friends were quiet and passive when Bill Clinton bombed Serbia nine years ago. The use of American air power to pummel a small European nation did not spark the conscience of people like Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi either. An aggressive, pre-emptive American war on Serbia was fine, because the leader of that nation engaged in crimes against humanity (unlike, I suppose, Saddam Hussein.)
This type of very discriminating anti-war activist resembles the Bolshevik anti-war activists during the crucial period between September 1939 and June 1941. As loyal communists, these Americans passionately fought any effort to support Churchill’s war against Hitler with Lend-Lease; they objected to American military rearmament or military research on college campuses; they argued against entering the war to defeat Nazism; they condemned Franklin Roosevelt as a war-monger. They were against war. They were against war until June 1941.
Then these same Bolsheviks were just as passionately in favor of war. They supported the fire-bombing of German cities; they agreed with Roosevelt’s war policy of “unconditional surrender”; they enthusiastically whipped up public support for war production; they produced vast amounts of war propaganda. What happened? Did Hitler, just suddenly, become evil? No: Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. These phony pacifists became the most bloodthirsty militarists because the politics of the war had changed.
Hitler was evil and Hitler did need to be destroyed, but that should have been the message of serious Americans before Hitler turned on Stalin. Indeed, the very fact that Hitler was a close ally of Stalin for almost two years should have been a greater reason to seek the defeat of Hitler, but, again, political interest trumped the moral issue of a just war or legitimate concern about the horrors of all wars.
The so-called pacifists who condemn Israel for defending itself are the same people say little, if anything, about the suicide attacks of Palestinians against Israeli citizens. Why are they not carrying signs in Gaza and in the West Bank asking Palestinians and other Arab and Moslem friends of terrorism to stop? Supporting Israel is politically verboten – it is not violence or war or the just use of force that matters; it is only what politics dictates that matters.
The politics that matters, of course, is radical Leftism. The “complaints” of American “anti-war” protesters are that America and Israel are imperialist nations who oppress people. Real oppression exists all around the world. Kim Jong Il has an entire nation which is little more than a concentration camp. The violent suppression of uprisings in China and Iran by a brutal police state is an everyday occurrence. But violence and war are not the concerns of these protesters.
If Iraq becomes a model free democracy, if violence in Iraq drops down to levels much lower than during the thuggish reign of Hussein, if Iraq become a force for peace in a region drench in the blood of war since the dawn of history – if everything good that can happen does happen – it still will not matter to our anti-war protesters. They are not about saving lives, preserving peace, ending war or creating harmony within the human race. They are about opposing America and Israel and the those two special nations represent.
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