Web Letters: Be Utopian: Demand the Realistic

A century of failed, distinctly Anglo-American, pacifism has to be seriously reconsidered.

The question is whether Anglo-American socialists today understand the patriotic or universal aspects of republican democracy any more than, say, the organization or technology of agrarian, commercial, industrial, or financial enterprise. Oddly, both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels really tried to develop such understanding and apply it to all the practical military and political questions of their day.

Today, Anglo-American socialists--including self-identified "progressives," mere opportunists, cringing liberals, and chickenhawks in the Democratic Party--have been selectively pacifistic throughout the twentieth century and, so far, right into the twenty-first century.

A few exceptions to the rule--anti-fascist deference to the USSR and support for the modernist strategic bombing theories of Churchill built on the archaic navalism of Roosevelt--show how feeble, even perverse this position is.

Basically, these peculiar socialists have entered into self-destructive coalitions with almost any reactionary or extremist opponent of republican democracy, if their pacifism fails and they find their precious lifestyles imperiled and their collective asses bare.

Ordinarily, though, socialists, as semi-religious pacifists, remain innocent of both the practical utility of military institutions and, thereby, necessarily ignorant of those institutions' natural limits and predictable failure-modes.

This precious ignorance is a dangerous bourgeois conceit: it is almost longing for a right-wing military coup in the US to justify moving somewhere else to take up a romantic life of armed revolution where it might be safer than here.

In any case, a mix of anti-military hostility, born of theatrical protest, and a condescending pity for both soldiers and the victims of military violence, born of smug self-righteousness, renders these socialists wildly unpopular in the US. It has alienated the Democratic Party of the United States from many who support the progressive policies of, say, the Socialist International today over, say, the post-cold war Internationale of capital flight, arms-bartering, drugs piracy and slave trade.

Actually, the SI does not embrace the pacifistic cults of Norman Angel or Bertrand Russell. And, why should they? Those old guys were liberal aristocrats and plutocrats.

Here are some basic matters that Anglo-American socialists have to reconsider:

Universal suffrage in a republican democracy is simply not practical without a universal military obligation. Maybe Her Majesty's happy subjects can get along without a written constitution and with a strictly long-term hire--"all volunteer"--military now that there is no empire to defend. But the US cannot uphold its own constitution by emulating the military institutions of the late British empire. We need a well regulated militia "for the security of a free state" instead of what we have: an emerging police state with the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Terms like "conscription" and "draft" refer to the breakdown of a voluntary military under the stress of wars nearly lost, starting with the anglophile Confederacy almost from the start of the Civil War.

In an actual republic, military service and the franchise are coterminous and as universal as practical given household life. So military formation and discipline are an actually or vestigially brutal coming-of-age rite that establishes moral foundations of solidarity where otherwise would be only juvenile narcissism, noble entitlement or pretention, and other social pathologies.

Military mobilization and action are, of course, wildly inefficient whether in preparing for unlikely contingencies or actually dealing with events that have dire individual or collective consequences. Of course, not preparing or dealing in a timely and effective way with such eventualities is even more wasteful. But, the important part of a "nation in arms" that has embraced the "moral equivalent" of war is that the decision to fight or not rests with patriotic elites responsible to an entire people, not just a few large donors and patrons at home or abroad seeking to "manage" a portfolio of wars with a mix of long-term hire regular and mercenary irregular forces. This is what "draft dodger" Bill Clinton and "chickenhawk" Dick Cheney agreed on. It is what the privileged elites of the American left and right are all too comfortable with.

But we know from the Jesuit experience in Paraguay that an unarmed socialist utopia of schools and hospitals rather than late-imperial military reservations and naval bases is possible and nearly idyllic. But the Jesuit Reductions were tragic in the end and should be a lesson to smug, sanctimonious heirs of Angel and Russell. Those in this pacifistical tradition may call themselves socialists but not in terms that socialists other than of the Anglo-American Settlement House aristocrat or Maryknoll Tourist would recognize.

John Robert BEHRMAN
State Committeeman, Texas Democratic Party

Houston, TX

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Lake Isabella, CA