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Show Ss | THE ZEPHYR/ APRIL-MAY 2007 | AGAINST the WAR in VIETNAM A STATEMENT By Wendell Berry This essay was first offered as a speech to the Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft at the University of Kentucky, February 10, 1968 I am a Kentuckian by birth, by predilection, and by choice. There are a good many people in this state whom I love deeply. And of all those perhaps only four believe that I should be speaking here today--and one of them is me. If that defines the difficulty of this speech, it also defines the necessity. I have received a dire warning that if I consort with such groups as this, I may be made a tool of “the Communist conspiracy.” I don’t believe that this warning was based on an accurate estimate of either my purpose or the group’s. But having been warned, I think it only fair-to-issue a-warning of my own: If there are indeed any communists in this audience, they should take care how they. consort with me, for Lintend to exercise an influence of my own and to subvert their aims.. Tam deeply moved that today’s meeting is taking place here in my State of Kentucky, for it means that the principle of thoughtful criticism and dissent, so indispensable to solution than violence. In spite of our constant lip service to the cause of conservation, we continue to live by an economy of destruction and waste, based.on extravagance and ostentation rather than need; we can see no reason to be saving, because we cannot imagine the future of the earth or the lives and the needs of those who will inherit the earth after us. We have been led to our present shameful behavior in Vietnam by this failure of imagination, this failure to perceive a relation between our ideals and our lives. We say that America is a nation founded upon ideals, and I believe that. 1 ama strong believer in those ideals because I think they offer the best hope for the chance of every person to live fully and to be free. But I am no longer able to believe that those ideals--or hope or decency or anything else that is desirable--can be advanced or preserved by force. That is . democracy, is alive here’ and may grow to be yet more alive. We are here because we feel that in the present grave circumstances our dissent and our criticism are more necessary to the health of our country than our acquiescence. We are here to become the voices, in this state, of the possibility of peace, which we believe to possibility of war. We are here because we believe peace and peaceableness a better policy than belligerence, and strength, and brotherhood more intelligent than hatred. One of the ugliest be a better possibility than the to be a better aim than victory, charity more persuasive than Perhaps--and not by our own characteristics of modern warfare is its almost exclusive intention--we are here also to test if the freedom of speech is alive in this state, and if dependence of the young... Kentuckians have believed themselves free to speak only because they have had nothing critical to say. 1am here because it is my faith that American political freedom is here, and because I believe that our countrymen of Kentucky, though they may not believe as we believe, will wish nevertheless to consider what we have to say. If this government desires to do something in the interest of I want to make clear at the outset that I am not an expert on any matter relating to the war in Vietnam. However, 1 have come to.a most painful awareness that the possibility of life in the world is being threatened and diminished by that war, and by the attitudes that causedit and permit it to continue. Now that every war risks the doom of the world, Ihave come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I have come to the realization that Iam not comforted, and I do not feel secured in my hopes, by the knowledge that American places are in the air, laden with the world’s death. And having come to this understanding, I must now speak of it, for as an American citizen I understand also that the right to speak implies an obligation to speak. : 2 : peace, it might begin by raising the draft age from eighteen to forty. why it sickens me to see us so willing to fight in order to influence the conduct of other nations. Why should we, who have splendid ideals and powerful arguments, rely primarily on violence rather than persuasion:and example? Our almost exclusive reliance on force I wish to be a spokesman of the belief suggests to me, as I think it must suggest to the other nations whose friendship we desire, that the human intelligence that could invent. that we have lost faith in our ideals and that we‘know we have failed to live up to them. It is a commonplace that men fight when their arguments fail. It may be credible that a weak nation’s arguments fail beca fit: knessBut ast tion’s are ts fail oS : ‘the apocalyptic weapons of modern war _ could invent as well the means of peace. because of moral default. : We say that America is a’ Christian and a democratic country. But I find nothing in the Gospels or in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution to justify our support of puppet tyrants, er-our slaughter of women and children, or our destruction of crops and villages and forest, or our herding of civilians into concentration camps in I cannot claim that I speak for any organization, nor do I wish to. I do not “belong” to any organization, and I have put no institution in charge of my opinions. However, I do belong in the fullest sense of the word to a large group that is having a vast and ever-increasing effect on the world. It is known as the human race. I am aware that as a member of that group I am in the worst possible company: communists, fascists and totalitarians of all sorts, militarists and tyrants, exploiters, vandals, gluttons, ignoramuses, murder- Vietnam. We do these things because we have forsaken our principles and abandoned ourselves to.the inertia of power. We have come to, depend obsessively on an enormous capability of violence--for security, for national self-esteem, even for economic stability. As a consequence we have become blind to the alternatives to violence. This involves us in a sort of official madness, in which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and deterrence, we commit one absurdity after another: We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to “win the hearts and minds of the people” by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the “truth” of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. ers, thieves, and liars, men for whose birth the creation is worse off and for whose lives other men will still be suffering a hundred years from now. The price of admission to this group is great, and until death not fully known. The cost of getting out is extreme. I find, therefore, no reasonable alternative to membership. But since I am a member on such exacting terms, I will not allow my involvement with this group to remain accidental, The ultimate madness, of course, is that in order to destroy our enemies we are willing but will give my whole allegiance to it and work for its betterment. I will not be optimistic, for its history is full of ugliness and cruelty and violence and waste; it has inflicted terrible damage on itself and on the world. But I will be steadfastly hopeful, for as a to build at great expense, and to keep in readiness, weapons whose use would inevitably destroy not only our enemies but ourselves and the world. All this is made frighteningly clear, in Vietnam, in our inability to control the swiftly widening discrepancy between member of the human race I am also in the company of men, though comparatively few, what we are doing and what we say we are doing. who through all the sad destructive centuries of our history have kept alive the vision of peace and kindness and generosity and humility and freedom--the sense of how comely and satisfying men’s lives would be if they were all free and at peace, and if they cared enough for the world and for each other. It is in behalf of that vision that I wish to speak. I wish to be a spokesman of the doubt that the great difficulties of our time can be solved by violence. I wish to be a spokesman of the belief that the human intelligence that could invent the apocalyptic weapons of modern war could invent as well the means of peace. Tam apposed to our war in Vietnam because I see it as a symptom of a deadly illness But I can best say why I am against this war by saying why I would be against any war. It has not yet been fully realized, and so it cannot be said too often, that the advent of the atomic bomb made a radical change in the human condition, and this change has been compounded by technological innovations of all sorts. Acts, modes of thought and behavior, that were tolerable twenty-five years ago are no longer tolerable. The smallest international conflict now palpably threatens to become World War II--which will not only be a war of men against men, but a war of men against the world, against life itself. It is now clear that men who turn in violence against their kind turn also against the creation. Surely the idea of a “limited war” is one of the most dangerously self-deceiving of mankind--the illness of selfishness and pride and greed which, empowered by modern weapons and technology, now threatens to destroy the world. It is our fate that all human history has reached a crisis in our time and in us. And though we inherit the attitudes and the habits and the conditions that have produced this crisis, we have not inherited the mental and the spiritual qualities that will be necessary to solve it; we must discover those resources in ourselves, and in our hope for the future. A.J. MuSte said that for the early Christians “The past did not simply grind out the future through the sieve of the present...change and possibility were the operative concepts with which they worked.” Do we think that peace is possible? If we do, then we must envision the particularities of that possibility. We must enact, and so substantiate, that possibility in our lives. Our crisis rises out of an utter confusion about two fundamental questions: How should we behave toward one another? And how should we behave toward the world? These questions can be phrased in another way: What do we mean and intend by the idea that men have rights? What is our relation, in terms of dependence and responsibility, to the world? That we are confused about the answers is suggested by our reluctance to ask the questions. The questions propose a painful and humble labor of the spirit, and we would rather be confused. Our failure is a failure of imagination. In spite of our repetitious outrage at the violence in our streets and slums, we spend seventy per cent of our revenue on weapons--and so prove beyond doubt that we cannot imagine a better verbal gimmicks ever invented. For though war makes use of reason, as a weapon, it is not reasonable in nature. Its nature is the nature of pride and anger. It follows the brute logic of violent emotion, which points directly toward the use of the greatest available power. We should not forget that men have never possessed an instrument of destruction that they have not finally used. The atomic bomb--that “unthinkable” weapon that we claim to shrink from using--was in fact, used by us before it had in any meaningful sense ever been heard of. ars have never made peace or preserved it or fostered its ideals. To have peace you must make peace with your enemy. To make peace only with your friends is to avoid the issue, and to permit a great principle to become absurd. Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques.and states of mind are prepared for the next war. World War _II, for instance, in which we can say with some justice that we fought on the right side and for good reasons, made us a more warlike nation than we were before. Before it was over we had committed, and made ourselves able to commit, acts of atrocity unimagined before. The unthinkable became the thinkable because we became willing to think of it. If lsolve my dispute with my neighbor by killing him, I have certainly solved the im_mediate dispute. If my neighbor was a scoundrel, then the world is no doubt better for his 12 |