The Pathology of Peace Protestors
Imagine a security guard at a store. When ever he saw something bad going on he would mull over the situation. “I heard that the store once over charged someone by accident, so I won’t restrain that man who is stealing that lap top computer.” “That person being mugged in house wares may be a bad person, so I won’t help them.” “This store may not have a proper handicap toilet stall, so I won’t stop that group over there from pulling an entire rack of leather coats out the window they just smashed out.” “This building really is not very pretty, so I won’t stop that person over there from setting fire to the sporting goods department.” In the end the guard has convinced himself that his only duty is to take home a pay check from a store that someone else built and runs, and that he fails to defend due to his silly rationalizations. That is not a high principal, but sheer cowardice and dereliction of duty.
That image can be constrasted with the WWII generation. Once while watching the D-Day movie The Longest Day, a person I was watching it with was disturbed by the night time paratrooper invasion. One scene in particular had a paratrooper inescapably descending, purely as a function of the random moment in time when he jumped from the airplane, above a Nazi machine gun nest. The person watching it suggested that the paratrooper pull out his rifle and pick off the machine gunners. If one was Rambo or Schwarzenegger in a Hollywood movie that would have worked. In the real world though, no matter how tough, or clever, or young, or bright that paratrooper was, he was going to die. His contribution to the war effort was merely to distract the machine gun nest from mowing down other descending paratroopers. This disturbed the person viewing it, as he thought that surely a clever person could have survived somehow. In the end, though, it was sobering that in war some must die and seemingly die at random. That paratrooper may have been a bright young person full of potential and promise with dreams and aspirations, yet died by the anonymous laws of probability. Although I do not recall seeing it in the movie, the day before General Eisenhower met with the paratroopers. They did not condemn him for sending them into occupied France in the dead of night. Surely they would have rather not gone, but they did. They held that there was something worth defending, something that was worth enough to risk falling to earth only to be cut into ribbons by a machine gun nest. In WWII, troops were not really given a tour of duty, or if there was a tour, odds were that one would not survive before qualifying for a trip home. A combat infantryman or a bomber pilot at the start of the war faced overwhelmingly grim odds at ever returning home.
The men who were drafted into the service had grown up in the great depression, which saw up to a fourth of all workers unemployed, after losing their life savings in bank failures. Back then young people did not prolong their adolescence at college in the pursuit of fluff degrees while they tried to ‘find themselves’; instead they tended to drop out in the 8th grade and work dawn to dusk on the farm, or in a factory—that is if they did not succumb to a childhood disease in the days before penicillin and polio vaccines. The depression had lingered on for a decade when the war started. So what were these people fighting for? The wonders of mass unemployment, for stock market crashes, for the glories of 8th grade educations? They fought because the American people, Western Civilization, Christendom, and consensual constitutional government were worth fighting for. America, Western Civilization, Christendom, and consensual constitutional governments were not perfect, and they knew that; but they also knew that the only things worse were everything else.
Today, now that the ‘me generation’ has turned into the psychotic narcissism generation, apparently nothing is worth fighting for in defense of a culture and a country inherited from our betters. America, Western Civilization, Christendom, and consensual constitutional government are condemned because they are not perfect, completely disregarding that everything else is not only imperfect as well, but not only much more imperfect but also usually not even trying, or even purposely pursuing barbarism. The remarkable Western ability of self-examination is turned into blind self-condemnation for the sole purpose of excising any reason for individual participation in collective self-defense, whether physically or intellectually. There is no outrageous lie muttered by Michael Moore or other puerile propagandist that will not be swallowed whole by today’s cowards. Bill Clinton had the gall to suggest that America deserved 9/11 because America had abused Indians in the past. In other words, do not fight terrorists, who told kids who thought that they were going fly to Disney Land that they were now going to be murdered after stewardesses had been slashed with razor blades, all because Custer was mean to the Indians over a hundred years earlier. If Clinton feels that much grief at being born in America maybe he should put his money where his mouth is and travel to Pakistan where surely a volunteer could be found to cut his head off. Maybe the amateur butcher could be persuaded to say something about the execution being in atonement for Custer along with the traditional chant about their god being great.
This is not to condemn bona fide pacifists, who reject all violence, even in defense of their own property and person. Such moral conviction should be admired, if it is genuine. But such bona fide pacifists (outside of the Amish and the Mennonites and such) are practically non-existent today, and a bona fide pacifist should present themselves as such; rather than resorting to ridiculous rationalizations over there being nothing worth defending. People today love violence. Movies and TV shows sell because of violence. People are delighted to engage in violence if they think they can get away with it. People fantasize about violence, and about beating or killing their enemies who are merely guilty of some trivial slight, certainly not of plotting the end of their country. There is nothing more pathetic than a rap or heavy metal singer glorifying violence in song and then saying that the country is not worth defending. Peace protestors love to fight and destroy and tear things up, so long as they know that the police will not descend to their level. They are brave when faced with a restrained hand. They know, however, that a terrorist shows no restraint, so they limit their ‘bravery’ to confronting their betters. They are not against violence; they are against someone fighting back.
Winston Churchill published a series of books after WWII titled A History of the English Speaking People. In the forward he proclaimed that an understanding of that history was essential to the survival of the great countries whose histories were record therein. The point was that only if people are aware that there is something worth defending will they actually do so: intellectually, economically, spiritually, or militarily. Today, students are more likely to know all about the internment of Japanese in Americana WWII than they would be of the Normandy invasion, Iwo Jima, Bastogne, the Battan Death Match, or Okinawa from their text books. They would more likely know about the great complainers in America’s history than about the great creators and the great doers.
McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader (5th), the reading text used to educate students a century ago, had the following poem:
I live for those who love me,
Whose hearts are kind and true;
For the heaven that smiles above me,
And awaits my spirit, too;
For all human ties that bind me,
For the task my God assigned me,
For the bright hopes left behind me,
And the good that I can do.
I live to learn their story,
Who suffered for my sake;
To emulate their glory,
And follow in their wake;
Bards, patriots, martyrs, sages,
The noble of all ages,
Whose deeds crown History's pages,
And Time's great volume make.
In other words, it used not to be all about ‘me,’ and there were things worth dying for, and death was to be welcomed before dishonor. How bizarre that people would more readily defend a country in a depression, with the prospect of anonymous factory jobs at their return, than people are today, with unprecedented wealth and opportunities. In the 1940’s big band music was popular, and one can not find a sample of the genre that crooned of gloom and doom and despair. Contrast that to the music of today: all is misery and woe1. Today people can not find enough to condemn of contemporary America so now people are ‘apologizing’ over slavery and who knows what past sins, willingly ignorant of the fact that it was Western Civilization that put an end to most slavery (it still exists in some Mohammedan countries in Africa). The point being that while Western Civilization has not always achieved the lofty goals it set before it, no other civilization has even tried.
The risk is not to be defeated by a more powerful enemy, but the failure to defend. The failure to defend a not quite perfect country and culture against the alternative: countries and cultures whose idea of perfection is torture, corruption, and genocide. The novel Man Alive by G.K. Chesterton spoke of a professor of philosophy who was all gloom and doom and who proclaimed that all was meaningless despair. One of his students so liked the professor that he generously offered to shoot him in the head and put him out of his misery. The professor feebly recanted. The student, who was on the marksmanship team, shot the professor’s hat off of his head. The professor vigorously recanted, after trying to escape by climbing out of a second story window, and very quickly concluded that living was really not that bad after all. Life was not perfect, but was the alternative better? Was the abstract despairing over, for example, the disparity of income between mill workers and mill owners worse than death? The professor was spared by the student and they both fully enjoyed life thereafter rather than grieving over every possible imperfection. Hopefully it will not take a glimpse of the alternative for America to find the will to live.
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1 The old joke goes that if one plays Rock music in reverse that one will get demonic lyrics and that if one plays Country music in reverse that one will get back their house, truck, their 'old lady', etc. There may be something to that: in Country music at least there was something of value lost, so there could be something valuable enough to defend as well. That could explain why Country music, so far, has been the genre to offer some defense of the country.