But observe what advantages the Hegelian terminology offers to the leaders of a mixed economy. When a country is at war, it has to use all of its power to fight and win as fast as possible. It cannot fight and non-fight at the same time. It cannot send its soldiers to die as cannon fodder, forbidding them to win. When a country is at war, its leaders cannot prattle about “cultural exchanges” and about “building bridges” to the enemy, as our leaders are doing—trade bridges to bolster the enemy’s economy and enable it to produce the planes and guns which are killing our own soldiers.
A country at war often resorts to smearing its enemy by spreading atrocity stories—a practice which a free, civilized country need not and should not resort to. A civilized country, with a free press, can let the facts speak for themselves. But what is the moral-intellectual state of a country that spreads smears and atrocity stories about itself and ignores or suppresses the facts known about the enemy’s atrocities? What is the moral-intellectual state of a country that permits its citizens to stage parades carrying the enemy’s—the Vi-etcong’s—flag? Or to collect funds for the enemy on university campuses? What makes this possible? The claim that we are not, allegedly, at war—only at “cold war.”
A country’s morale is crucially important, in wartime. In World War II, the British Lord Haw-Haw was, properly, regarded as a traitor—for the crime of trying to undercut the British soldiers’ morale by broadcasting scare stories about Nazi Germany’s invincible power. In a “cold war,” such as we have today, Lord Haw-Haw’s job is performed by our’ own public leaders. The sickening scare stories about “escalation,” about our fear of war with China, would be morally shameful if indulged in by the leaders of Monaco or Luxemburg. When they come from the leaders of the most powerful country on earth, “shameful” is not an adequate word to describe their moral meaning.
If a country knows that it cannot fight another country, it does not undertake to fight. If a country is actually weak, it does not go into battle screaming: “Please don’t take me seriously—I won’t go very far!” It does not proclaim its fear as proof of its desire for peace.
There is only one sense in which that ghastly phenomenon has to be classified as a non-war: the United States has nothing to gain from it. Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.) When a nation resorts to war, it has some purpose, rightly or wrongly, something to fight for—and the only justifiable purpose is self-defense. If you want to see the ultimate, suicidal extreme of altruism, on an international scale, observe the war in Vietnam—a war in which American soldiers are dying for no purpose whatever.
This is the ugliest evil of the Vietnam war, that it does not serve any national interest of the United States—that it is a pure instance of blind, senseless, altruistic, self-sacrificial slaughter. This is the evil—not the revolting stuff that the Vietniks are howling about.
None of us knows why we are in that war, how we got in, or what will take us out. Whenever our public leaders attempt to explain it to us, they make the mystery greater. They tell us simultaneously that we are fighting for the interests of the United States—and that the United States has no “selfish” interests in that war. They tell us that communism is the enemy—and they attack, denounce, and smear any anti-communists in this country. They tell us that the spread of communism must be contained in Asia—but not in Africa. They tell us that communist aggression must be resisted in Vietnam—but not in Europe. They tell us that we must defend the freedom of South Vietnam—but not the freedom of East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Katanga, etc. They tell us that North Vietnam is
a threat to our national security—but Cuba is not. They tell us that we must defend South Vietnam’s right to hold a “democratic” election, and to vote itself into communism, if it wishes, provided it does so by vote—which means that we are not fighting for any political ideal or any principle of justice, but only for unlimited majority rule, and that the goal for which American soldiers are dying is to be determined by somebody else’s vote. They tell us also that we must force South Vietnam to accept communists into a coalition government—a process by which we delivered China to the communists, which fact we must not mention. They tell us that we must defend South Vietnam’s right to “national self-determination”—and that anyone upholding the national sovereignty of the United States is an isolationist, that nationalism is evil, that the globe is our homeland and we must be prepared to die for any part of it, except the continent of North America.
Is it any wonder that no one believes the pronouncements of our public leaders any longer, neither the American people nor foreign nations? Our anti-ideologists are beginning to worry about this problem. But—in their typical style—they do not say that somebody is lying, they say that there exists a “credibility gap.”
Observe the terms in which the war in Vietnam is discussed. There are no stated goals, no intellectual issues. But there are, apparently, two opposing sides which are designated, not by any specific ideological concepts, but by images, which is appropriate to the primitive epistemology of savages: the “hawks” and the “doves.” But the “hawks” are cooing apologetically, and the “doves” are snarling their heads off.
The same groups that coined the term “isolationist” in World War II—to designate anyone who held that the internal affairs of other countries are not the responsibility of the United States—these same groups are screaming that the United States has no right to interfere in the internal affairs of Vietnam.
Nobody has proposed a goal which, if achieved, would terminate that war—except President Johnson, who has offered a billion dollars as the price of peace; not a billion dollars paid to us, but a billion dollars paid by us for the economic development of Vietnam; which means that we are fighting for the privilege of turning every American taxpayer into a serf laboring part of his time for the benefit of his Vietnamese masters. But, demonstrating that irrationality is not a monopoly of the United States, North Vietnam has rejected that offer.
No, there is no proper solution for the war in Vietnam: it is a war we should never have entered. To continue it, is senseless—to withdraw from it, would be one more act of appeasement on our long, shameful record. The ultimate result of appeasement is a world war, as demonstrated by World War II; in today’s context, it may mean a nuclear world war.
That we let ourselves be trapped into a situation of that kind, is the consequence of fifty years of a suicidal foreign policy. One cannot correct a consequence without correcting its cause; if such disasters could be solved “pragmatically,” i.e., out of context, on the spur and range of the moment, a nation would not need any foreign policy. And this is an example of why we do need a policy based on long-range principles, i.e., an ideology. But a revision of our foreign policy, from its basic premises on up, is what today’s anti-ideologists dare not contemplate. The worse its results, the louder our public leaders proclaim that our foreign policy is bipartisan.
A proper solution would be to elect statesmen—if such appeared—with a radically different foreign policy, a policy explicitly and proudly dedicated to the defense of America’s rights and national self-interests, repudiating foreign aid and all forms of international self-immolation. On such a policy, we could withdraw from Vietnam at once—and the withdrawal would not be misunderstood by anyone, and the world would have a chance to achieve peace. But such statesmen do not exist at present. In today’s conditions, the only alternative is to fight that war and win it as fast as possible—and thus gain time to develop new statesmen with a new foreign policy, before the old one pushes us into another “cold war,” just as the “cold war” in Korea pushed us into Vietnam.
The institution that enables our leaders to indulge in such recklessly irresponsible ventures is the military draft.
The question of the draft is, perhaps, the most important single issue debated today. But the terms in which it is being debated are a sorry manifestation of our anti-ideological “mainstream.”
Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.