Veteran’s Day was yesterday, of course, but the American soldiers who aren’t currently deployed or otherwise indispensable were given today off as a Federal Holiday, and so on the off chance that they happen to come across my corner of the internet, I’d like to share a message of encouragement with them from John Stuart Mill’s essay The Contest in America written on the occasion of the War Between the States:
I cannot join with those who cry Peace, peace. I cannot wish that this war should not have been engaged in by the North, or that being engaged in, it should be terminated on any conditions but such as would retain the whole of the Territories as free soil. I am not blind to the possibility that it may require a long war to lower the arrogance and tame the aggressive ambition of the slave-owners, to the point of either returning to the Union, or consenting to remain out of it with their present limits. But war in a good cause is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice–is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
When I was a new recruit in the USAF, we were required to memorize part of this passage (shown above in bold) during our basic training. I do think that it makes far more sense in context, and even provides the rudiments for a sort of utilitarian just war theory. I’m not going to expound upon that right at the moment, but suffice to say that it has been many decades since Americans have fought a war for any purpose other than “to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice.”
No doubt my pacifist friends will disagree.
