Thoughts while stuck

By SKIP MENDLER

The back gate of the pickup truck was plastered with bumper stickers. We couldn’t go anywhere until the road crew guy turned his stop sign around, and it looked like that wouldn’t be happening for several minutes at least. So in the meantime, the bumper stickers provided me with a little reading material, and some food for thought.

One had the UN symbol and the words “U.N.-AMERICAN” – it took me a moment to realize that the truck’s owner meant to call the UN un-American, not to say that he was a “UN American.” Another declared he was “Not as MEAN, Not as LEAN, but still a MARINE.” On another, there was an early display of allegiance to “RICE ’08.” And then there was this one:

“Except for ending SLAVERY, FASCISM, NAZISM, and COMMUNISM… WAR HAS NEVER SOLVED ANYTHING.”

Well, that one threw down the gauntlet, for sure—a clear challenge to one of the basic pacifist beliefs, that “war is not the answer.” The person who devised that slogan probably felt that it demolished the pacifist position at one stroke—four, actually. Four major evils of the last couple of centuries, from which war clearly delivered us… obvious as the nose on your face, right? Darn stupid peaceniks, anyway!

Well, now, not so fast. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to see that this is a superficial analysis, and not even historically valid.

Slavery? The main focus of the Civil War was the preservation of the Union, not the elimination of slavery. Indeed, the Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the Confederate states. Slavery was eventually ended in other states not by armed conflict, but through the patient work of abolitionists, and the growing sense of conscience among Americans who became convinced that slavery was wrong.

Communism? The fall of communism in Eastern Europe can be linked to a lot of factors, but a direct military defeat of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact wasn’t one of them. In Vietnam and North Korea, in fact, war failed to end communist regimes, and as recent events have reminded us, the communist regime in Cuba has outlasted several American administrations. And of course, there’s the People’s Republic of China, although the degree to which that regime fits the communist model anymore is arguable.

And as for Nazism and fascism, we need to turn our perspective around, to the point of view of the aggressors in World War II—for whom expansion through military means succeeded for a while, but which ultimately brought about their downfalls. In the long run, war solved nothing for the people who created the conflict… and if they hadn’t initiated aggression against other countries, but merely busied themselves with the repression of their own peoples, would we have gone in and started a war to remove them? In fact it was by starting war that the fascists sealed their own fates.

There are folks who are the exact opposite of pacifists. Not only do such folks—I call them “belligerists”—refuse to see war as a bad thing on its face, but actually believe that it’s a valid and worthwhile part of human experience, one to be embraced rather than avoided, celebrated rather than regretted, and that it is the best solution to certain problems. But history and experience say something very different. If things were otherwise, if the belligerists were right, the problems of the Middle East would have been solved long ago. That they haven’t is the most poignant example of the ultimate failure that is war. But it seems that some folks can’t get beyond their attachment to conflict and their need for enemies.

And that’s a hell of a place to be stuck.