Perhaps Laura Bush should have known better. When she
invited a group of poets and critics to the White House in
February to celebrate American poetry, she counted on a literary
crowd acting in a way that would serve literature. As everyone
knows, she sharply underestimated the quotient of adolescent
self-righteousness in this segment of the population. With the United
States poised to rid the world of hideous tyranny in Iraq, it was
simply business as usual when Sam Hamill, a poet and
publisher,
broadcast an email calling on his fellow scribes to boycott the
event and
organize a series of protests against the impending
conflict. It was, as Mr. Hamill explicitly noted, a rerun of
the 1960s, a chance to “reconstitute a Poets Against the War
movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in
Vietnam.”
The little pacifist dramas that erupted on college campuses and
elsewhere across the country in February did not, despite the
crowds they drew, amount to much. We witnessed a lot of self-congratulation, a
lot of narcissistic grandstanding, and, where poets were
involved, a seemingly endless amount of bad poetry. But the net
effect was … nothing. Well, not quite nothing. One
distinguished poet we know described the outbursts as “squeals
from the nursery.” That is exactly right. The pity is that those
squeals monopolized the ink and the airtime, marginalizing the
many sensible poets who, whatever their political orientation,
are mature enough to know that one does not repay hospitality
with bad behavior. We suspect that Mrs. Bush will think twice
before extending another invitation to the poetry establishment:
who can blame her? She sought to organize a literary event,
and a
few preening thugs managed to re-
inforce the image of poets as
irresponsible dreamers.
No sane person can contemplate war without misgiving. But history
shows that the pacifist option, far from preventing wars,
generally makes them more deadly. In his book Modern Times, the
historian Paul Johnson quotes from a candid secret briefing
that Josef Goebbels gave in April 1940, only weeks before the Nazis
overran France and took Paris with hardly a shot. “Up to now,”
Goebbels wrote in this oft-quoted passage,
we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning
Germany’s real goals, just as before 1932 our domestic foes never
saw where we were going or that our oath of legality was just a
trick.
We wanted to come to power legally, but we did not want
to use power legally. They could have suppressed us. They could
have arrested a couple of us in 1925 and that would have been
that, the end. No, they let us through the danger zone. That’s
exactly how it was in foreign policy, too… . In 1933 a
French premier ought to have said
(and if I had been the French
premier I would have said it):
“The new Reich Chancellor is the
man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man
cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we
march!” But they didn’t do it. They left us alone and let us
slip through the risky zone.
… And when we were done, and
well armed, better than they, then they started the war!
Hitler could have been easily stopped in 1936 when he
remilitarized the Rhineland: the intellectuals of the time
wouldn’t hear of it. He could have been easily stopped in 1938
when he gobbled up Austria and then much of Czechoslovakia:
Neville Chamberlain spoke for the biens pensants when he
returned from Munich waving a piece of paper and declaring he had brought
“peace in our time.” Hitler might even have been stopped, though
less easily, in 1939 after he invaded Poland, had the French
acted decisively. Instead, the world was subjected to six years
of horrific war.
Saddam Hussein has frankly acknowledged that Hitler and Stalin
are his models, his heroes. Accordingly, no one should be
surprised that he has tortured, maimed, and murdered
hundreds of thousands of his own people and killed hundreds of
thousands more in his predatory wars. Evidence of Hussein’s
appetite for acquiring chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons
is beyond dispute, while evidence for his links to al Qaeda and
other terrorist groups mounts daily. Where are the intellectuals
marching to protest those things? As the journalist Barbara Amiel
noted in the London Daily Telegraph a few days after the big
anti-war protest there,
The most revealing aspect of the anti-war march in London
was what you did not see. You did not see any messages to Saddam
Hussein or criticism of Iraqi policy… .
If this were a genuine anti-war demonstration, why, along with
demands on the British and Americans, would there be no demands
of the other party to the conflict—Iraq? Commentators on the
march were taken by the good order of it. I was taken by the
sheer wickedness or naïveté… .
All those nice middle-aged people from middle England with their
children bundled up against the cold, marching for peace; did
they have nothing to say to the party that had ignored 17 UN
resolutions? A similar silence existed in all the anti-war
marches in Europe. One either has to question the good faith of
the marchers—or their brains.
Iraq is still, we must hope, in that “risky zone” that
Goebbels spoke about. We can stop Hussein now. Or we can be
forced to try to stop him later when he is capable of greater
damage. What will it take? Another, perhaps even more
devastating, 9/11? The poets and other protesters who pretend that George
Bush is somehow more threatening than the tyrant who rules Iraq
are the grave diggers not only of countless Iraqis but
potentially also of many of their fellow Americans.
