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Show THE ZEPHYR/ APRIL-MAY 2007 absence. But in killing my neighbor, though he may have been a terrible man who did not deserve to live, I have made myself a killer--and the life of my next neighbor is in greater peril than the life of the last. In making myself a killer I have destroyed the possibility of neighborhood. It is a mistake to believe that we only invest the wealth and the lives of our citizens in war. We invest their minds, too. We assume, dangerously, that minds invested in war, and trained to be warlike, can, at the signing of a treaty, be simply withdrawn from warfare and made peaceable. But the training needed for peace cannot be the same as that which is necessary for war. Men cannot be taught and encouraged to kill by fostering those impulses of compassion and justice and reasonableness that make it possible to hope for peace. The mentality of war, no matter how just the cause, is the mentality of bloodthirst, anger, arrogance, hatred, cunning, and passionate oversimplification. In fighting a war, therefore, we are not preparing for peace, but preparing, inevitably, for the next war. One of the ugliest characteristics of modern warfare is its almost exclusive dependence of the young--the willingness to misuse young minds, to teach killing to men too young to have fully understood what it might mean to live, much less to kill or to die. The cynicism of that is more suicide. Why do we depend so on the young to fight our wars? There is only one answer: The young are persuadable. The young can be made to feel in army camps and on battlefields what their comfortable elders are content to feel only in suburbs and offices. If this government desires to do something in the interest of peace, it might begin by raising the draft age from eighteen to forty. But there is an argument against war that is yet more practical and apparent. It is that in the condition of war the two other major problems of our time, civil rights and conservation, cannot be adequately dealt with. It is obvious that war is the natural enemy of civil rights and liberties, and that, as its weapons and territories have increased through modern times, it has become increasingly destructive and wasteful of the lands involved and of their natural resources. No one any longer denies that the war in Vietnam is making it impossible for us to deal effectively with these other problems. The order of priorities is inverted and destruction is out of control; because of the urgencies of the war, temporary advantages appear more desirable than permanent values. It is necessary for us to realize that when we speak of our reasons for opposing the war we have already begun to speak of the great difficulty of the task of peace. Anyone who would undertake to hope or work for peace had better be fully aware of what he has against him. There is the same danger of oversimplification in the controversy over the war in this country as there is in the war itself. The fault of the President's widely advertised interest in peace is the weary nationalistic convention that all the wrong is on the other side: we are peace-loving, they are war-like; we are good, they are bad. I am unmoved by this sort of talk simply because I am the counterargument that all the wrong is on our side. I think that if we submit to the temptation to think in this way we will only be preparing yet another conflict, which yet other dissenters will see to be stupid and without justification. years, and it is more meaningful and necessary now that it ever was before; it is only by this vision that the peace movement may hope to survive the war and remain relevant to our time and our predicament. We have no right to hope for a better world unless we make ourselves better men. There are other dangers. There is the danger that the peace movement will be perverted by self-righteousness and disillusionment and anger. There is the danger that it will come to oppose violence with violence and hatred with hate--and so go over to the side of war after all. There is the danger that it will not be realistic enough, and so expect too easy a success, and grow bitter. There is the danger that it will not be critical enough of itself, and so grow soft and proud. There is the danger that we will begin to say, as some have said already, that because we face an extraordinary crisis we may be justified in behavior that would not be justified in a better time--that because our aims are high and our intentions good, we deserve the privilege of morale expediency. This is exactly the sort of moral finagling that permits men to fight “Christian” wars, and to kill one another in the interest of peace and brotherhood. There is the danger that we will become anti-Vietnam or anti-Johnson specialists. Our obligation, once this impulse of peace has entered our thoughts, is to will it to grow and ramify until if affects all that we do. In seeking to change the world, we must see that we also change our lives. In promoting the cause of public peace, we should not neglect the equally difficult task of making ourselves peaceable. If we wish to oppose the government on the issue of war, let us make sure that there is a meaningful difference between ourselves and the government on that issue. The revolution that interests me and that I believe in is not the revolution by which men change governments, but that by which they change themselves. For myself, I must say that I have little faith that we can improve ourselves or our condition merely by forming into organizations and drafting statements and giving public allegiance to principles. We have no right to hope for a better world unless we make ourselves better men. We must patiently and humbly seek out the causes of war that lie in our own thoughts and our own behavior, never forgetting that we are human beings, members of a war-making species. We must recognize that a dishonest or a wasteful or a violent life is as great a danger to the world as a weapon of war, and the violence of neighbors is the model of the violence of nations, and the hope for order in the world fails in a disorderly household. Why am I against the war? I have two inescapable reasons. The first is that ] am a Supporters of the war are constantly asking teacher; the second that I am a to write the oversimplified language of warfare or to believe it. As a teacher, I reject absolutely the notion that a man may best serve this country by serving in the army. As a teacher, I try to suggest to my students the possibility of a life that is full and conscious and atrocities committed by the other side? and responsible, and I am no longer able to believe that such a life can either lead to war or serve the ends of war. The answer, so far.as I am concerned, is that I do... But I am responsible for the wrongs and atrocities committed by our side Supporters of the war are constantly asking those who oppose it: Why don’t you deplore the wrongs and atrocities committed by the other side? The answer, so far as ] am concerned, is that I do deplore the wrongs and atrocities committed by the other side. But father. lam unable to teach on the assumption that it is part of my function to prepare young men to fit into the war machine--to invent weapons or manufacture them or use them, those who oppose it: Why don’t you deplore the wrongs As a father, I must look at my son, and I must ask if there is anything I possess--any _right, any piece of property, any comfort, any joy--that I would ask him to die to permit me to keep. I must ask if I believe that it would be meaningful--after his mother and I have loved each other and begotten him and loved him--for him to die in a lump with a number hanging around his neck. I must ask if his life would have come to meaning or nobility or any usefulness if he should sit--with his human hands and head and eyes--in the cockpit of a bomber, dealing out pain and grief to people unknown to him. And my answer to all these questions is one that I must attempt to live by: No. I am responsible for the wrongs and atrocities committed by our side. And I am no longer able to participate in the assumption that atrocities committed by remote control are less objectionable than those committed by arm’s length. I am most concerned with American obstacles to peace because I am an American. One of these obstacles, obviously, is our enormous military investment. It is the rule Wendell Berry is the author of over forty books of fiction, poetry, and essays, including The Unsettling of America, What are People than when one has one’s money invested in a machine, one does not wish to see the machine stand idle; the idleness of the machine means economic ruin. The United States is now investing seventy per cent of its money in a war machine. This means, however re- For?, Another Turn of the Crank, and Citizenship Papers. He has farmed a hillside in his native Henry County, Kentucky, for over ny years. A former propessor of Englis at the University of at he has received numerous awards for luctant we may be to admit it, that we have become a militarist society; we have a vested interest in war. Another obstacle is hypocrisy. Because we are a people with taxing ideals, and a normal love of moral comfort, it is perhaps understandable that we have evolved into an amazingly proficient set of hypocrites. And I think that a lot of our trouble is caused by our hypocrisy, which has blinded us to the difference between what we are and what we would like to be. A credibility gap exists not only between us and our government, but also between us and ourselves. Our ideals no longer serve us, because, though we probably talk about them more than ever, we no longer act according to them or judge ourselves by them. his work, including the T. S. Eliot Award, the Aiken failot Award for Poetry, and the John Hay Award of the Orion Society. But, it will be asked, can one be concerned with only one side of such a problem? If www.wendellberrybooks.com America were to become peaceable, and to live up to her Christian and democratic ideals, surely some warlike nation would destroy her. I do not know how to reply to that objection except to ask in return: Does the hope of peace lie in waiting for peace, or in being peaceable? If I see what is right, should I wait for the world to see it, or should I make myself right immediately, and thus be an example to the world? And now | must ask: If a man believes as I have said I believe, what should he do? The question is agonizing and I am not certain of the answer. But because I have children, and because I presume to offer myself to young men and women asa teacher, it is a question that I must ask. In the absence of better answers than I know, I must make myself willing to live with the question. Clearly, those who disagree with the war policy have an obligation to say so. They have been entrusted with an idea and an argument. To me, that defines the function and the responsibility and the discipline of the peace effort: to advance the idea and the argument of peace. The main objective of any expression of demonstration by peace groups should be to articulate as fully as possible the desirability and the possibility of peace. I believe that a great danger to the cause of peace is the possibility that the peace movement might become merely negative, an instrument of protest rather than hope. Protest, necessary as it is, can only be temporary, for it is the creature of a political condition that is temporary. But the vision of peace is permanent; it has been with us for hundreds of EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Wendell Berry for permission to re-print “A Statement Against the Vietnam War. And to Shoemaker & Hoard publishers for providing a new edition of “The Long Legged House,” which had been out of print for more than 25 years...JS 13 |