1908 the Delusion of Militarism

8/3/2019 1908 the Delusion of Militarism

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WAGING WAR TO MAKE PEACE

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ON THE DELUSION OF MILITARISM

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

A fascinating article entitled 'The Delusion of Militarism' appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in

1908. It was penned by Charles Edward Jefferson (1860-1937), a New York author and minister.

The first paragraph grabs the eye:

"The future historian of the first decade of the twentieth century will be puzzled. He will find

that the world at the opening of the century was in an extraordinarily belligerent mood, and that

the mood was well-nigh universal, dominating the New World as well as the Old, the Orient no

less than the Occident. He will find that preparations for war, especially among nations which




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confessed allegiance to the Prince of Peace, were carried forward with tremendous energy and

enthusiasm, and that the air was filled with prophetic voices, picturing national calamities and

predicting bloody and world-embracing conflicts."

The imagined violence and prophecies of coming horrors would be realized in fact even though

peace was being championed by world leaders and national statesmen, international workers'organizations and peace leagues, conventions and courts. Indeed, prior to the outbreak of the

Great War in 1914, many experts considered international peace to be the foregone conclusion of

economic development; after all, with the world inextricably linked by trade, what capitalist in

his right mind would want to destroy accumulated capital and sever trade relations by waging

war? Still, contrary to the proposition that perpetual peace was at hand, rumor had it that world

war was imminent. As a matter fact, we know that generals had been preparing for 14 August

several years prior to the invasion.

Charles Jefferson, confronted by the contradiction between professed peace and the profession of

war, with the "unprecedented growth of peace sentiment, accompanied by a constant increase of

jealousy and suspicion, of fear and panic, among the nations of the earth," conducted an

investigation, and tracked down the source of the war rumors to their origin: "(The) fountains

from which flowed these dark and swollen streams of war rumor were all located within the

military and naval encampments."

Jefferson followed the flow of war talk downstream to legislative bodies where representatives

had been convinced by the violent images and affirmations of the military experts that war was

in fact imminent; therefore their countries were really in grave danger. Hence an insane

armament race around the world was launched. For instance, the infamous Dreadnought race

between Germany with its Naval League, and Britain with its two-for-one policy, requiring it to

have twice the naval power of any other two nations in order to secure world peace. The United

States also suggested war along naval channels, sending a fleet of battleships on a peace mission

around the world. And armies were enlarged accordingly and weapons improved and proliferatedso that the world would have peace. The militant vision was literally driving men mad:

"(The) mere presence of the shining apparatus of death may have kindled in men's hearts feelings

of jealousy and distrust, and created panics.... It was only men who lived their life with guns who

were haunted by horrible visions and kept dreaming hideous dreams and that the larger the

armament the more was a nation harassed by fears of invasion and possible annihilation.... Was it

a form of national lunacy, this frenzied outpouring of national treasure for the engines of

destruction? Was it an hallucination, this feverish conviction that only by guns can a nation's

dignity be symbolized, and her place in the world's life and action be honorably maintained?"

Knowing fully well that war is butchery, murder, hell on earth, men built more guns, launchedmore battleships, recruited colossal armies and justified all this as peace-making with a pagan

maxim in mind: "If you wish for peace, prepare for war." What was the result of this mass

delusion? Chaos and war: but of course. It is as if anxious people in want of peace were to join a

perverse group therapy program, where, in session after session, they are firmly commanded to

relax and to breathe deeply as the group-affirmation is repeated: "The enemy is out to get us, kill

the enemy; the enemy is to get us, kill the enemy...." Full attention is then directed at clear

images of invading armies committing all sorts of atrocities, followed by images of glorious




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victories over the enemies of peace. If the therapy is effective, the subjects will be possessed by

an unshakeable conviction in the patently absurd creed that peace is made by murdering other

peace-makers.

This warmongering creed will be something different than normal dogmatism and fanaticism: If

the power of suggestion in professional hands is as powerful as it is said to be, the subjects willeventually be rendered unable to believe in any alternative concept of reality. They shall begin to

hallucinate, to see an enemy approaching where there is none, and no argument shall suffice to

convince them otherwise: "A man who has the impression he is being tracked by a vindictive and

relentless foe,” wrote Reverend Jefferson, “is not going to sit down and quietly listen to an

argument the aim of which is to prove that no such enemy exists."

The group will take on an overpowering significance to which all ideas of persecution will be

referred for the suggested response—killing people to save the world. It will be difficult to wrest

the overarching delusion, that of the supreme importance of the all-absorbing state, from

members of the group, because the delusion gives them a feeling of security. Reverend Jefferson

duly noted that the militarist "is exceedingly impatient under contradiction; and, here again, he is

like all victims of hallucinations. To deny his assumptions or to question his conclusions is to

him both blasphemy and treason, a sort of profanity and imbecility worthy of contempt and

scorn."

Delusions are usually individual mistakes, not mistakes held in common such as the optical

illusion that the world is flat. Mr. Jefferson posed the question, "Is it possible, someone asks, for

a world to become insane?" He answers in the affirmative and provides several examples: the

witchcraft delusion in Salem; the insanity associated with the Gunpowder Plot in London; the

"hallucination" a thousand years ago that the world was coming to an end. Since he wrote his

essay in 1908, he had not yet for examples the mass insanity of the Great War and its devastating

sequel, World War II.

The implications waging war to make peace are stupendous today: much more can be done with

much less; splitting a few atoms here and there can devastate a large portion of the world. A few

men and women can destroy a city with a suitcase. Even a relatively small act of terror in

comparison to the murder of millions can terrorize a paranoid populace into running amok in the

name of global peace. Whether the force is exercised by a legitimate state or a group without a

country, in both revolution and war we find a militant fundamentalist minority egging the masses

on to chaos, They would soon make cannon meat out of millions of people. These militant neo-

fundamentalists in state departments and remote caves preach the old doctrine that life is a war of

all against all; that might makes right; that life on earth, according to the old model of god, is

meant to be hell on earth so that the fittest who obey god's orders may survive, at least in the

nebulous Hereafter. All those who die in battle are said to rest in Eternal Peace, or to have goneHome.

Proposals have often been made to liquidate the war-mongering minority at home and abroad:

kill the enemy terrorists and kill one's own leaders. Of course he who kills his own kind is evil,

while killing another kind is fitting in the international jungle of anarchic natural right, where the

natural law of reasonable society is not recognized. Naturally there are exceptions to that rule:

one may murder hundreds, thousands, millions of one's own kind, providing they are sent off to




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war against the enemy. In any case, the burden of proof is always on the enemy, who is guilty

until proven innocent, of doing what every egoistic leviathan has done or is doing: secretly

preparing for war in order to secure the domestic peace.

A leader of the free world may not openly murder someone at home, but he may covertly

authorize the assassination of alien leaders. He may for instance foster the rape and murder of "leftist" nuns and priests and the murder of countless "communists" in Latin America, sometimes

whole native villages including women and children. He may deal drugs and arms, consort with

international mobsters, and support the tyrants and terrorists he will later want to kill. He may

have suspects murdered abroad without a trial; he may hold others in concentration camps for

indefinite periods without legal process. And all this while preaching democracy to the world—

at home he will be a great hero. The great democratic leader might condemn a diabolical man

and his satanic generals for their mass murders, then offer them asylum somewhere. And

knowing that sanctions have never worked; knowing that sanctions have served only to enrich

tyrants and aggravate the harm to their tyrannized subjects, who are not inclined to rise up

against the tyrants unless they are promised military assistance; - the hero of democracy may

impose and continue sanctions until at least one million innocent people have been killed, thenpoint at the prosperous tyrant and say, "Look what he has done! Why didn't the people rise up

against him? Now I must save them." And when people, thinking he is their ally, do rise up at his

instigation against the tyrant, the democratic hero stands down while thousands of them are

killed and buried in mass graves. Then his son will stand up to assuage his father’s shame, and

his finger will be greater than has father’s thigh as he converts the land into hell on earth.

What hypocrisy! Well, then, why don't the peace-loving people of the world rise up together and

exterminate the war-mongering minorities of every nation? For one thing, that remedy would be

a continuation of war as usual. Secondly, other licensed mass murderers would fill their bloody

boots. Furthermore, the history of the Great War teaches us that, once war is started,

internationalist pacifists take sides and become militant nationalists rallying around their

respective flags, no matter what form of government the war banners symbolize.

Besides, it seems that people love to kill each other for the thrill of it or for no apparent reason at

all—prosperity is no guarantee of peace. Zoologists tell us that even animals make war; alas,

scientific experiments have yet to find the cause—there was plenty of things and space to go

around, but one day some animals of the same kind showed up and all hell broke loose. The

traditional justifications and rationalizations for war before and after the fact make 'reason'

appear to be a mangy albeit logical dog dragged behind the war machine. Perhaps war, the

greatest evil of all—some say it the greatest good—is caused by a virus or a bacterium; that is, if

humans are not originally evil. Charles Edward Jefferson speculated on the possibility as

follows:

"There are multiplying developments which are leading thoughtful observers to suspect that this

pre-Christian maxim ("If you wish peace, prepare for war") is a piece of antiquated wisdom, and

that the desire to establish peace in our modern world by brandishing the instruments of war is a

product of mental aberration. Certainly there are indications pointing in this direction. The

world's brain may possibly have become unbalanced by a bacillus carried in the folds of a

heathen adage. The most virulent and devastating disease now raging on the earth is militarism."




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Reverend Jefferson obviously resorts to metaphor: there is no such thing as an evil germ,

bacillus, or virus in the microscopic sense. We might just as well say that peace causes war. We

would not be the first to make the converse pronouncement that, "If you want war, prepare for

peace." This is not a mere play on words. Not only can repeated suggestions of war lead to war:

so may repeated suggestions of peace made in the name of brotherly or neighborly love

accompanied by a vision of a definite utopia lead to war when someone wants to impose theparticular vision. Militarists naturally imagine the violent means, and as ends in themselves if

they love war enough. A warrior's duty is not to question but to do his duty but to make war on

command, even if that means, teaches the Gita, that one's own relative will be killed. Now that

war is not the occupation of a caste, it is no wonder that people at large who must dutifully die in

wars want civilian control over the military forces - of course many soldiers once engaged in

battle have often begged to differ with the principle of civilian control during the war itself.

However that may be, politicians may dream of a certain universal peace to be had. Maybe they

want to make the world safe for social democracy, or republican democracy, or national

socialism, if not for brotherly love. Therefore they must make war to impose their version of

universal peace onto the world.

Irving Babbitt, a leading humanist of his day, pointed out in his 1920 lecture, 'Democracy and

Imperialism', that the masses have been sacrificed to the humanitarian theory of universal

brotherhood:

"(This) particular ideal of union among men actually promotes the reality of the strife that it is

supposed to prevent. One might without being too fanciful establish a sort of synchronism

between the prevalence of pacific schemes and the outbreak of war. The propaganda of the Abbe

de Saint-Pierre was followed by the wars of Frederick the Great. The humanitarian movement of

the end of the eighteenth century, which found expression in Kant's treatise on Perpetual Peace,

was followed and attended by twenty years of the bloodiest fighting the world has ever known.

The pacifist agitation of the early twentieth century, that found outer expression in the Peace

Palace at The Hague, was succeeded by battle lines hundreds of miles long. The late M.

Boutroux, whom no one will accuse of being a cynic, said to a reporter of the Temps in 1912 that

from the amount of peace talk abroad, he inferred that the future was likely to be 'supremely

warlike and bloody.'"

Babbitt compared the clashes between states and alliances of states to clashes between

Frankenstein monsters, and reminded his readers that Dr. Frankenstein's monster had a beautiful

sentimental soul, but he became ruthless when the beauty of his soul and his yearnings were not

appreciated by others. Babbitt concludes his lecture with, "Here again the last stage of

sentimentalism is homicidal-mania."

Hard-core militarists despise "feel-good" brotherly love as weakness or cowardice or stupidity,or they deny the possibility of a universal humanitarian brotherhood, preferring the clean love of

barracks and trenches. The brotherly love of their fighting unit is better than any other brotherly

love, especially the brotherly love of (expletive deleted) liberals who want to destroy the natural

peace-making order of war; therefore, like other heretics and atheists, pacifists of all persuasions

should be sent to the hell they are going to anyway lest they contaminate others. Like Thomas

Carlyle, some conservatives accuse lovers of veiled hate: "Beneath this rose-colored veil of

universal benevolence is a dark, contentious, hell-on-earth," said Carlyle. Love for one’s own




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kind or group may be based on hate for others; i.e. it is hate-based love. Be forewarned, then,

that all efforts besides war to pacify the human race are doomed to failure. War is good and

inevitable because men do not know what is good without submitting the important questions to

the ultimate test. A life not worth dying for is not worth living. Long periods of peace corrupt

and demoralize men. Peace is the cause of war. War is for our moral betterment; what it does for

warring coyotes is another matter.

We very well should be mindful of the dangers of making a universal out of a particular idea, of

imposing a particular concrete utopia on the human race. But we are also mindful of the dangers

of preaching violent means to achieve any sort of peace. We are but children grown up.

Reverend Jefferson, speaking of the pageants of battleships given in his day, reminds us that

children are most impressionable to our worship of violence and displays of weapons:

"Children cannot look upon symbols of brute force, extolled and exalted by their elders, without

getting the impression that a nation's power is measured by the caliber if its guns, and that its

influence is determined by the explosive force of its shells. A fleet of battleships gives the wrong

impression of what America is, and conceals the secret which has made America great. Children

do not know that we became a great world power without the assistance of either army or navy,

building ourselves up on everlasting principles by means of our schools and churches."

War historians will beg to differ with Jefferson's analysis. For example, after Geoffrey Perret

graduated from high school in Wheaton, Illinois, he joined the U.S. Army. He is armed with

degrees from the University of Southern California and Harvard—he studied law at Berkeley.

His first book was about World War II. But most highly recommended is his A Country Made by

War, From the Revolution to Vietnam - the Story of America's Rise to Power (1989). To wit: War

makes America great.

On the other hand, it behooves us to remember that there was a revolution within the American

Revolution. The principles of the Declaration of Independence have still not been fully outlinedby the U.S. Constitution. "Our fathers had an intuition," says Reverend Jefferson, "that the New

World would be different from the Old, that it had a unique destiny, and that it must pursue an

original course."

What Original Course does our author and minister recommend instead of the violent images and

affirmations? "The deliverance will come as soon as men begin to think, and examine the

sophistries with which militarism has flooded the world."

In other words, rather than leaving us with constructive images, perhaps with some quotes from

the New Testament, he seems to recommend the talking-cure, the dialectical and analytical

method, in hopes that it will bring people to their senses, that it will wake people up to the truth.Think again and again.

As previously noted, once war breaks out, pacifists tend to become patriots and internationalists

become nationalists - or go into prison, into death camps, into exile. What truth should we wake

up to? We are all by nature born imitators. What vision should we imitate? What affirmation

shall we daily repeat? Should we raise the Cross of Jesus and repeat the maxim unto our dying

breath: "It is better to be killed than to kill."




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Does anyone have New World vision of peace to offer, one that the whole of humanity can

believe is a realizable ideal? In 1908 one Charles Edward Jefferson said that the Old World

policy of militarism was dead wrong. He was proven right by the Great War, World War II, and

every war thereafter. But, tired of waiting back then for the inevitable, our minister finallycapitulates, and plays an old tune: "It is possible to buy peace at too high a price. Better fight and

get done with it than keep nations incessantly thinking evil thoughts about their neighbors."

In want of a better model, we leave off here to search for one, with the beginning of Jefferson's

concluding paragraph in mind: "Will America become a leader? At present we are an imitator."

Sources:

The Delusion of Militarism, The Atlantic Monthly, CIII, 1908

Democracy and Leadership, by Irving Babbitt, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1924

Selected Quotation:

"The key to German historical teaching is to be found in Count Moltke's dictum: 'Perpetual peace

is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world

ordained by God.' 'Without war the world would stagnate and lose itself in materialism.' And the

anti-Christian German philosopher, Nietzsche, found himself quite at one with the pious field-

marshal. 'It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment,' he observes, 'to expect much (even anything at

all) from mankind if it forgets how to make war. As yet no means are known which call so much

into action as a great war that rough energy born of the camp, that deep impersonality born of

hatred, that conscience born of murder and cold-bloodedness, that fervour born of effort in the

annihilation of the enemy, that proud indifference to loss, to one's own existence, to that of one's

fellows, that earthquake-like soul-shaking which a people needs when it is losing its vitality.'" -The Outline of HIstory by H.G. Wells, New York: Macmillan 1921

Honolulu 2003

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1908 the Delusion of Militarism