J.M.Opal: Making Peace Patriotic
[J. M. Opal teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He is just beginning a book on the relationships between war, memory, and democratic politics in the early Jacksonian era.]
President Bush and his courtiers like to remind us that we are "at war," a prepositional phrase that casts a pall over the entire culture. With whom or what are we at war, you ask? Not Al Qaeda, or the assorted fanatics it inspired by killing three thousand people on 9/11, or even the shadowy insurgents of Iraq or Afghanistan. Rather, we are at war with an abstraction: "terror." Plainly, such a war has no discernible end point; clearly, this is the intention. War not only serves the geopolitical designs of our right-wing rulers but also vindicates their absolutist cosmology, in which force and "faith" obviate reason, circumstance, and the decent opinion of others. However much they boast and hector and call for blood, they do not want to win so much as they want to remain "at war." The best evidence of this is how impatiently they prosecuted a war of grim necessity (Afghanistan) in order to wage one of predatory choice (Iraq).
In order to contest this Orwellian strategy and the carnage that ensues, opponents of war in general and the Iraq disaster in particular need to ground their arguments in a coherent rationale of civic virtue. It is not enough to simply say, "peace is patriotic," because the terms of patriotism have been contaminated by the cynical dichotomies of us versus them, good versus evil, freedom versus terror. The meanings of public duty and good citizenship must be rebuilt to reflect the saner voices within and among us, or else the present bloodletting will merge seamlessly into some other war for some other reason. I write rebuilt because those antiwar principles once represented a potent voice in American civic life. Like the wisdom of such organizations as Veterans for Peace, the arguments of the fifty-odd "Peace Societies" of the 1810s and 1820s offer a valuable perspective that might enable a less homicidal future.
It is always easy to dismiss peace writers as hapless dreamers, holed up in pleasant bubbles of their own making. True to script, the "friends of peace" of the early nineteenth century were often New England Unitarians who presumed, evidence notwithstanding, that white Christians were uniquely "civilized" and so destined to uplift the heathen masses of the earth. And yet they also included veterans of the recent Anglo-American wars and residents of Ohio, North Carolina, New York, and, for that matter, London. Cosmopolitan in spirit if not in lifestyle, they had inherited the eighteenth-century principle of "universal benevolence," or goodwill to all nations. That global perspective fell out of favor during the French Revolution, when conservatives such as Edmund Burke applauded "national prejudices" as positive and natural. But after the prodigious bloodshed of the Napoleonic era, peace writers revived the humanistic ideal and sought to apply it in a more practical and wizened way. In short, they were idealists, not dreamers....
Read entire article at Common-Place
President Bush and his courtiers like to remind us that we are "at war," a prepositional phrase that casts a pall over the entire culture. With whom or what are we at war, you ask? Not Al Qaeda, or the assorted fanatics it inspired by killing three thousand people on 9/11, or even the shadowy insurgents of Iraq or Afghanistan. Rather, we are at war with an abstraction: "terror." Plainly, such a war has no discernible end point; clearly, this is the intention. War not only serves the geopolitical designs of our right-wing rulers but also vindicates their absolutist cosmology, in which force and "faith" obviate reason, circumstance, and the decent opinion of others. However much they boast and hector and call for blood, they do not want to win so much as they want to remain "at war." The best evidence of this is how impatiently they prosecuted a war of grim necessity (Afghanistan) in order to wage one of predatory choice (Iraq).
In order to contest this Orwellian strategy and the carnage that ensues, opponents of war in general and the Iraq disaster in particular need to ground their arguments in a coherent rationale of civic virtue. It is not enough to simply say, "peace is patriotic," because the terms of patriotism have been contaminated by the cynical dichotomies of us versus them, good versus evil, freedom versus terror. The meanings of public duty and good citizenship must be rebuilt to reflect the saner voices within and among us, or else the present bloodletting will merge seamlessly into some other war for some other reason. I write rebuilt because those antiwar principles once represented a potent voice in American civic life. Like the wisdom of such organizations as Veterans for Peace, the arguments of the fifty-odd "Peace Societies" of the 1810s and 1820s offer a valuable perspective that might enable a less homicidal future.
It is always easy to dismiss peace writers as hapless dreamers, holed up in pleasant bubbles of their own making. True to script, the "friends of peace" of the early nineteenth century were often New England Unitarians who presumed, evidence notwithstanding, that white Christians were uniquely "civilized" and so destined to uplift the heathen masses of the earth. And yet they also included veterans of the recent Anglo-American wars and residents of Ohio, North Carolina, New York, and, for that matter, London. Cosmopolitan in spirit if not in lifestyle, they had inherited the eighteenth-century principle of "universal benevolence," or goodwill to all nations. That global perspective fell out of favor during the French Revolution, when conservatives such as Edmund Burke applauded "national prejudices" as positive and natural. But after the prodigious bloodshed of the Napoleonic era, peace writers revived the humanistic ideal and sought to apply it in a more practical and wizened way. In short, they were idealists, not dreamers....