American essays -- 20th century; State, The; World War, 1914-1918
The penalty the realist pays for accepting war is to see disappear
one by one the justifications for accepting it. He must either become
a genuine Realpolitiker and brazen it through, or else he must feel
sorry for his intuition and regretful that he willed the war. But
so easy is forgetting and so slow the change of events that he is
more likely to ignore the collapse of his case. If he finds that his
government is relinquishing the crucial moves of that strategy for
which he was willing to use the technique of war, he is likely to move
easily to the ground that it will all come out in the end the same
anyway. He soon becomes satisfied with tacitly ratifying whatever
happens, or at least straining to find the grain of unplausible hope
that may be latent in the situation.
But what then is there really to choose between the realist who
accepts evil in order to manipulate it to a great end, but who
somehow unaccountably finds events turn sour on him, and the Utopian
pacifist who cannot stomach the evil and will have none of it? Both
are helpless, both are coerced. The Utopian, however, knows that he
is ineffective and that he is coerced, while the realist, evading
disillusionment, moves in a twilight zone of half-hearted criticism,
and hopings for the best, where he does not become a tacit fatalist.
The latter would be the manlier position, but then where would be his
realistic philosophy of intelligence and choice? Professor Dewey has
become impatient at the merely good and merely conscientious objectors
to war who do not attach their conscience and intelligence to forces
moving in another direction. But in wartime there are literally no
valid forces moving in another direction. War determines its own
end--victory, and government crushes out automatically all forces that
deflect, or threaten to deflect, energy from the path of organization
to that end. All governments will act in this way, the most democratic
as well as the most autocratic. It is only “liberal” naïveté that
is shocked at arbitrary coercion and suppression. Willing war means
willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it. A good
many people still seem to believe in a peculiar kind of democratic and
antiseptic war. The pacifists opposed the war because they knew this
was an illusion, and because of the myriad hurts they knew war would do
the promise of democracy at home. For once the babes and sucklings seem
to have been wiser than the children of light.
V
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