The Sense & Nonsense of War

militarycemetary [1]1,635 words

Does war make sense?

Many racialists believe our “brothers’ wars” have had catastrophic, even suicidal, demographic consequences, and are dysgenic as well.

Others argue for war’s utility or desirability on various grounds.

I belong to the camp that doesn’t see much value in it.

War stories make for stirring, colorful telling, as do stories of other conflicts, including memorable athletic events. There is a venerable genre of sports fiction, for example. And many men are “war buffs,” fascinated by various wars, most popularly the Civil War or WW II.

But I am not a fan of warfare or the military.

Both Skeptics and Soldiers

Part of the reason is personal.

My Swedish-American grandfather and father were both rank-and-file Midwestern isolationists. Grandpa, who died ten years before I was born, was a Socialist who voted for Eugene Debs and opposed both World Wars I and II.

Philosophically, even as a young Leftist unsympathetic to Germany, I likewise harbored an isolationist view of WW II. It was the only position that made sense. This was unpopular in college, where “isolationism” was a dirty word to my professors.

But I looked upon anti-isolationism with disdain. I’ve never been swayed by wrong opinions, even if they’re universally consecrated, de rigeur, or constitute a mandated party line (today known as “political correctness”).

My father and two uncles evaded service in WW II, a conflict for which they displayed no martial enthusiasm whatsoever.

Dad was somehow classified 4-F, which was fine with him, despite the fact that he was as healthy as a horse and lived to be 92. He was a lifelong hypochondriac, though, which drove his mother-in-law (my Norwegian grandmother) nuts. Indeed, he was a pain in the neck in that regard.

I just missed the Vietnam War. My lottery number was so low I would certainly have gone, but President Nixon ended the fiasco in the nick of time. I never had the slightest desire to fight. Several of my cousins served.

Many of my ancestors were soldiers at various points in their lives. A few were professionals.

Quantitatively speaking, in my family tree in the US, Norway, and Sweden, soldiers rank a distant second to tillers of the soil, but ahead of a handful of Lutheran clergymen and theologians.

Two of my Norwegian “uncles” fought in the Union Army. One later returned to Norway, but the other was killed in the first major engagement of the Civil War, the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee.

He died in the midst of fierce fighting at the storied “Hornet’s Nest,” where the Union forces held the line against repeated Confederate assaults for seven hours. He’s buried there in a mass, unmarked grave, the precise location of which is unknown.

[2]

Shiloh National Military Park, Monument to the 1st Battery, Minnesota Light Artillery at the Hornet’s Nest

My Swedish-American second cousin (Dad’s first cousin) told me a story about his service in Europe during WW II.

Alone, on patrol, he unexpectedly came face to face with a German soldier likewise patrolling alone. Both were armed. They stared at one another for a time, then turned and silently went their separate ways.

When the Germans invaded Norway, my grandmother sent care packages home to her family in her native, mountainous Gudbrandsdal.

In my grandfather’s region, in the southwestern part of the country near the sea, the Germans established an encampment on the shore of the lake situated on the farm which has been in our family for centuries. When my mother visited in 1980, she asked a relative there what the occupation had been like.

The only reply the woman made was that when her little boy became deathly ill they brought him to the German doctors, who saved his life.

Why Do We Fight?

I’ve occasionally asked people why they (or their children) volunteer.

I asked this question of an older cousin who served in Korea. In return I received a blank stare. Clearly, no one had ever asked the question before.

An Irish-American woman whose sons are fighting in the Middle East responded with the same blank look, before replying lamely, “To serve our country.”

I’m not certain what goes on in their heads at such times. Perhaps it’s like asking, “Why do you eat meals?” or “Why do you drink water?” At least, that’s the impression I sometimes get looking into their faces.

What remains of the white American population, clueless and disinterested, is visibly aging, dying, and being replaced by non-white immigrants. Yet its members blithely wave the red, white, and blue, send their dwindling stock of children overseas to murder and die for the Jews, and “support our troops” as “patriotically” as if their race weren’t on the verge of extinction.

Thoughtlessly volunteering for military service whenever politicians or aliens whip up a war seems to be an innate reflex for most people.

Of course, this is not always the case. The man who died at Shiloh wrote a letter home setting forth his reasons for fighting. A pious Lutheran, he opposed slavery.

Whether that was his only reason, I don’t know, but it was unquestionably a major one.

I suspect that he either came to this country intending to fight before establishing a farm on the Minnesota frontier (which is where he went), or he needed food, shelter, clothing, and money, which enlistment in the army provided.

At any rate, the first thing he did upon arrival, apart from traveling directly to the far frontier, was to enlist.

Most whites, I think, like war. (I’m not excluding other races from this charge; as Lawrence Keeley persuasively suggests [3], it’s probably a universal human trait.)

I assume war has always been, at one level, a major form of human entertainment, like the sporting events whites are so crazy about.

The eager majorities who fight are psychologically constructed, it seems, to think they’ll be doing the killing and others the suffering and dying. The idea appeals to them.

As long as governments provide the stamp of approval (very important for whites!), pin medals on soldiers’ chests, and reward vets with generous benefits, people will unreluctantly murder, rape, torture, and pillage. As a soldier or cop you can legally do many things criminals ordinarily do, yet win high esteem and monetary reward for it.

In peacetime, way back when, whites were decent and trustworthy enough to leave their homes empty and unlocked for hours or days on end. No one worried about it, or needed to. Nor were there numerous rapes and murders as there are today.

But declare war and equip the same people with uniforms, rifles, bombs, napalm, missiles, and drones, and whoa! Kindly Dr. Jekyll vanishes and Mr. Hyde suddenly displays his hideous face.

How long has he been lurking there, just beneath the surface?

Revolution

I’m not a pacifist, but as a natural-born anti-authoritarian and, frankly, moralist, I can think of few wars, past or present, to which I would assent. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any.

War is dumb. I’d rather read books than kill people, watch others kill, or be taxed or have my country bankrupted to pay for killing people I have no grudge against.

Because rulers are bad more often than good, revolutions are more justifiable than wars, as long as they’re virtuous. But that excludes totalitarian revolutions, beginning with the French.

I admire America’s founders and strive to learn from them, but the justifiability of their revolution is another question. It’s perhaps a matter best not examined too closely; it probably wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Today’s ruling class finds itself in an awkward position.

Not only are its core values and policies grotesquely evil and unjust, but they directly contradict the rulers’ own incessantly repeated, but totally hypocritical and moralistic, standards and laws.

“Genocide.” “Racism.” “Hate.” “Freedom of speech.” “Separation of church and state.” One could go on and on. It is so completely blatant.

“The tree of liberty,” Thomas Jefferson said, “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Sometimes, the bastards leave you no other choice.

Epilogue

It is doubtful that war can ever be successfully “outlawed” or “abolished.” It appears to be part of human nature, innate to the human species.

Therefore, “universal peace” is not an appropriate goal for statecraft or political philosophy.

That simplistic dogma, devised by conceited, irresponsible intellectuals and fantasists, attempts to do what cannot be done. Like so many other utopian dogmas it will fail, generating even greater problems, as did “the war to end all wars.”

Insistence upon “universal peace” opens the door to rigidly stratified globalist totalitarianism, a worse form of violence and tyranny.

Despite all of this, respect for simple justice and the continuous mitigation of wrongs, including the evils of warfare, are admirable objectives.

As with most matters of statecraft and political philosophy, the problem of war is best dealt with in a realistic, reformist, mitigationist fashion, absent utopian and totalitarian dogmas; the mindset of the American Revolution rather than the French or Communist revolutions.

As in Zeno’s Paradoxes [4], you approach ever more closely to a goal that you will never actually reach.

Also warranted is healthy skepticism concerning the justice, wisdom, desirability, and rationality of almost any specific war—past, present, or future.

Grass

By Swedish-American poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides3/Grass.html [5]