Knowledge And Decisions

The uncontrolled political climate of a free nation allows the development of ideological currents inimical to national defense — the so-called “neutron bomb” episode being but one example — or even the orchestration of propaganda campaigns by foreign powers with an obvious vested interest in reduced Western military defense. Moreover, the unverified nature of arguments about nuclear prospects — prospects that no sane person wants verified — gives a special political advantage to the verbally adept, that is, to intellectuals, who have tended to be antimilitary at least as far back as the Roman Empire.²⁷⁸ It was precisely at the leading British universities that young men took the “Oxford Pledge” in the 1930s never to defend their own country in warfare.²⁷⁹ Such pacifist reaction to the carnage of World War I may have been understandable, like the current American reaction to the bitterness of Vietnam. However, such attitudes were a crucial element in the Western powers’ appeasement of Hitler at a time when they had superior military force but were politically incapable of using it.²⁸⁰ By the time Hitler’s rearmament policy, annexations, and conquests had changed Britain’s attitude, he now had superior military force. When the young men who took the “Oxford Pledge” saw Hitler’s armies marching and the bombs falling on their own homes, they vindicated themselves in the skies over Britain and later on the beaches at Normandy. But it was still a desperately close brush with subjugation by one of the greatest barbarians in human history. Hitler’s outrages put a pacifist intellectual like Einstein in the ironic position of initiating the development of the most destructive military weapon ever used. But now that the nuclear age is here, such changes of mind as a result of crisis experience may no longer be possible — or at least, not in time to change policy and change history. The timetable of a nuclear war — or nuclear blackmail — may not permit second thoughts about what should have been done when we had the chance.

For a richer and technologically more advanced nation to fall behind militarily, when national survival and the survival of democratic freedom internationally are among the stakes, requires a certain amount of demoralization. No one supplies this demoralization more constantly or effectively than intellectuals. Again, this is not, historically, a new role for intellectuals, The intellectuals’ vision has long taken precedence over any tangible reality. In the Roman Empire, the vision was religious salvation, and if divisiveness was engendered by persecutions of pagans, thereby weakening a whole civilization in the face of barbarian invaders, so be it. If the social visions behind the French Revolution required the execution of tens of thousands of human beings (including revolutionary philosophers like Condorcet), so be it. If the vision of proletarian communism or German racial purity required that millions be slain, so be it. Against this background, there is hardly any reason for surprise if current visions of “social justice” do not moderate to accommodate military necessity, or if campaigns to discredit rival elites like businessmen or the military are so all-out that the consequences are the demoralization of a whole civilization and a weakening of the will to defend it.

In this context, it is understandable how an American official can speak of the military arms race as something for which “all of us here in America are to blame,” how “the United States has led the way in arms escalation” and how “the lion’s share of the blame,” within the U.S. “belongs to the business sector of society” which is seeking “the profits of doom.”²⁸¹ It is a remarkable statement from an official representative of the United States to the U.N. Disarmament Session, and particularly for the representative of a country that demobilized almost 90 percent of its armed forces in three years and has voluntarily relinquished military supremacy over the years by cutting back the resources devoted to it. But it is no more remarkable than statements by former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young equating massive slave labor camps in the Soviet Union with individual miscarriages of justice in American courts, calling the victims of both “political prisoners.” Both officials are extreme examples of a more general tendency toward national demoralization, without which such people could not survive in their official positions. The public’s outrage is a sign that the battle is not over, but that American officials can continue in office after making anti-American propaganda on an international stage is also a sign of the political climate.

THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM