The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
News of the Tautological
“Michigan Equipment Manager Jon Falk Transports All Kinds of Gear to Florida for Bowl Game”–headline, AnnArbor.com, Dec. 30
Breaking News From 1206
“The Biggest Tests for Mongolia Lie Ahead”–headline, The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 3
Colman McCarthy Was Right
The passage of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010, which will give the president discretion to allow military service by open homosexuals, reopens the question of ROTC at elite universities, many of which had cited antigay discrimination as a reason to keep their Vietnam-era bans in place.
Pacifist Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist who “directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington and teaches courses on nonviolence at four area universities and two high schools,” is unalterably opposed to ROTC. He’s received a lot of attention the past few days for an op-ed piece he wrote for the Post in which he describes ROTC as a “taint” on “the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace.”
It’s a totally wrongheaded and poorly argued piece. But we’d like to focus on the one paragraph in which he says something true:
To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join . . . for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home. In recent years, I’ve had several Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans in my college classes. If only the peace movement were as populated by people of such resolve and daring.
This matches our own experience. When we’ve encountered American servicemen and recent veterans, we’ve found them to be some of the finest men, and occasionally women, we’ve ever met. The military represents the best of America, and it’s good to hear even a pacifist admit it.
Alert readers will note that in quoting McCarthy, we have made him the beneficiary of perhaps the most charitable elision in history. We did so because the paragraph contained an invidious and distracting comparison, and we wanted to focus on what McCarthy said that was true. Here’s how the full paragraph reads:
To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America’s or the Taliban’s: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home. In recent years, I’ve had several Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans in my college classes. If only the peace movement were as populated by people of such resolve and daring.
The first thing that must be said about this is that whereas McCarthy knows from experience what American combat veterans are like, his professed admiration for the “soldiers” of the Taliban’s “army” is purely notional. What is behind this notion is oikophobia, or disdain for America.
Such an attitude shouldn’t surprise us. Unless you are a citizen of a determinedly neutral nation like Sweden, patriotism and pacifism are almost impossible to reconcile. An attachment to one’s own country entails the temptation to side with it, and against its enemies, in case of war. And to sustain the belief that war is always the greatest of evils, it is helpful, perhaps necessary, to diminish other evils–hence McCarthy’s implied moral equivalence between the America and the Taliban.
With this background, you can see how McCarthy would process the puzzling realization that American warriors are men of exceptionally admirable character. His oikophobia prevents him from considering the possibility that this has anything to do with their being American, so it must be that all warriors–even the Taliban–are admirable.
Wait, did he just say all warriors are admirable? Some pacifist this guy is!
But actually, he goes even further, acknowledging that the people who make up “the peace movement” are of inferior character compared with American military servicemen. To hear McCarthy tell it, they are inferior even to the Taliban. We wouldn’t go that far, but we have to agree with his overall point. To the extent that there is such a thing as a “peace movement” in America, its members are a contemptible lot. But why are peaceniks so unworthy?
For one thing, because pacifism is dumb. It is merely the reductio ad absurdum of the trivial truth that war is bad. Philosophers and statesmen have a wide range of opinions as to when going to war is wise, justified or necessary. Only a child or a simpleton thinks the answer is “never.” Thus the “peace movement” tends to attract the dull and the immature.
To be sure, under some circumstances it takes courage to stand against one’s government. A public pacifist in Nazi Germany, or in Iran or North Korea today, would be an admirable figure notwithstanding the naiveté of his ideology. By contrast, being a pacifist in 21st-century America entails risking exactly nothing. One can even make a comfortable career of it. Just ask Colman McCarthy.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
