Love and Cynicism

Wow. What a week it's already been.

Monday's dustup with the lead-paint-chip crowd in my comment section seems to have more or less blown over; the hordes of anonymous cranks would seem to have moved on to greener pastures, perhaps swarming someone who claimed Worf was cooler than Spock.

But one comment stuck with me; in a flash of the kind of serendipity that makes blogging so much fun, it happened to come at the right place and right time.

Yesterday, someone left a comment in one of my threads:

You support the Great and Glorious War Against Some Brown People That in No Way Was Trumped Up, right?

Of course not. I support the war against Terrorism, against dictators in whose interest terrorists work and for whose interest they support terror, against nations and people who would impart their views upon the world via terror, whether state-sponsored or delivered via dynamite vests or hijacked airliners.

Which led me to Red's piece today, an essay by Antoine Saint Exupery written in the middle of World War II.

This part seemed appropriate:

Friends in America, I would like to do you complete justice. Perhaps, someday, more or less serious disputes will arise between us. Every nation is selfish and every nation considers its selfishness sacred. Perhaps your feeling of power may, someday, lead you to seize advantages for yourselves that we consider unjust to us. Perhaps, sometime in the future, more or less violent disputes may occur between us. If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen. If therefore, at some future date, I were to inwardly reproach those American businessmen, I could never forget the high-minded war aims of your country. I shall always bear witness in the same way to your fundamental qualities. American mothers did not give their sons for the pursuit of material aims. Nor did these boys accept the idea of risking their lives for such material aims. I know - and will later tell my countrymen - that it was a spiritual crusade that led you into the war.

I have two specific proofs of this among others. Here is the first.

During this crossing in convoy, mingling as I did with your soldiers, I was inevitably a witness to the war propaganda they were fed. Any propaganda is by definition amoral, and in other to achieve its aim it makes use of any sentiment, whether noble, vulgar, or base. If the American soldiers had been sent to war merely in order to protect American interests, their propaganda would have insisted heavily on your oil wells, your rubber plantations, your threatened commercial markets. But such subjects were hardly mentioned. If war propaganda stressed other things, it was because your soldiers wanted to hear about other things. And what were they told to justify the sacrifice of their lives in their own eyes? They were told of the hostages hanged in Poland, the hostages shot in France. They were told of a new form of slavery that threatened to stifle part of humanity. Propaganda spoke to them not about themselves, but about others. They were made to feel solidarity with all humanity. The fifty thousand soldiers of this convoy were going to war, not for the citizens of the United States, but for man, for human respect, for man's freedom and greatness. The nobility of your countrymen dictated the same nobility where propaganda was concerned. If someday your peace-treaty technicians should, for material and political reasons, injure something of France, they would be betraying your true face. How could I forget the great cause for which the American people fought?

"Mais non," the detractors might have bellowed, "they are just fighting to enrich Getty Oil and Henry Ford and Henry Kaiser!"

Here's the deal; to believe that this war is about enriching Halliburton, you have to believe that the American people - the ones who are joining the military and fighting the war - are essentially stupid; that they are so mentally incapable of reasoning that they can not, on their own, divine what this war is about.

Which isn't too out of character for some detractors, but let's leave that out for the moment. The typical American soldier would seem to see an inherent nobility to the cause of freeing "those brown people" from dictators, terrorists and thugs, something similar to what Saint Exupery saw. If they didn't, they wouldn't do what they're doing. They'd stay home. They would not re-enlist (as, in fact, they are doing in record numbers overseas today), they would play no part in the whole venture.

And yet they do. One more quote from Saint Exupery:

One evening, a twenty-year-old American pilot invited me and my friends to dinner. He was tormented by a moral problem that seemed very important to him. But he was shy and couldn't make up his mind to confide his secret torment to us. We had to ply him with drink before he finally explained, blushing: "This morning I completed my twenty-fifth war mission. It was over Trieste. For an instant I was engaged with several Messerschmitt 109s. I'll do it again tomorrow and I may be shot down. You know why you are fighting. You have to save your country. But I have nothing to do with your problems in Europe. Our interests lie in the Pacific. And so if I accept the risk of being buried here, it is, I believe, in order to help you get back your country. Every man has a right to be free in his own country. But if and my compatriots help you to regain your country, will you help us in turn in the Pacific?"

We felt like hugging our young comrade! In the hour of danger, he needed reassurance for his faith in the solidarity of all humanity. I know that war is indivisible, and that a mission over Trieste indirectly serves American interests in the Pacific, but our comrade was unaware of these complications. And the next day he would accept the risks of war in order to restore our country to us. How could I forget such a testimony? How could I not be touched, even now, by the memory of this?

Friends in America, you see it seems that something new is emerging on our planet. It is true that technical progress in modern times has linked men together like a complex nervous system. The means of travel are numerous and communication is instantaneous - We are joined together materially like the cells of a single body, but this body has as yet no soul. This organism is not yet aware of its unity as a whole. The hand does not yet know that it is one with the eye . And yet it is this awareness of future unity which vaguely tormented this twenty-year-old pilot and which was already at work in him.

For the first time in the history of the world, your young men are dying in a war that - despite all its horrors - is for them an experience of love. Do not betray them. Let them dictate their peace when the time comes! Let that peace reassemble them! This war is honorable; may their spiritual faith make peace as honorable.

Experience of love, freely entered into? Or killing little brown people for Halliburton?

It's not an idle question.

Posted by Mitch at June 1, 2005 12:34 PM | TrackBack