Ways to End the World

Burke wrote in his A Rhetoric of Motives that while war is usually conceived of as the opposite of peace, this doesn’t actually make sense. It would be fore more accurate to describe it as a special case of peace. When I read that sentence, I knew it was going to stay with me for the rest of my life — that it explained so much, I hardly needed to read his explanation, because I recognized it immediately. Hopefully it has a similar effect for you, but Burke is frequently weird and confusing, so I’ll say a little about what that statement means to me.

His argument was essentially that all of the conditions that lead inexorably to war are basic and (so far as we know) unchangeable features of peace. The division of nervous systems into tribes, with which they can experience identification or consubstantiality, and the combination of scapegoating and victimage* lead to the possibility and even the likelihood of war. The conflict between Us and Them, which is produced by a mixture of this tribalism and the need to justify the kill and the distribution/redistribution of property, creates the potential and the justification for the slaughter.

Once I got this, I understood why it is absolutely vital to our elites that “serious” people constantly express the rectitude of the slaughter, and the willingness to pursue it. I understood why they have determined that only the people who express those ideas are serious. I understood why Obama and Clinton and McCain all agree that “all options are always on the table.” By maintaining this consensus, they maintain our readiness, in this state of peace, to declare the special state of peace that is war. They are keeping us stoked, just in case.

We can argue about whether they do this against their will or because they have to do so to remain “serious.” Many believe that Obama or Clinton is really a super peacenik who only pretends to like blowing stuff up in order to compensate for being a woman or a liberal or whatever. But whether or not they mean it doesn’t really matter — they are helping to prepare us either way.

And whether or not Clinton actually wants to kill every single man, woman and child in Iran doesn’t really matter. I’m not particularly sure that she does, but it’s a distinction without a difference. Whatever her secret, innermost wishes, she is actively upping the ante. She is attempting to prove she is “serious” by promising, and preparing us for, a new level of slaughter. It is to Obama’s credit that so far he has not chosen to descend to that level. For that matter, I’m not even sure McCain has ever expressed such baldly genocidal desires, though I have little doubt he shares them.

Democrats keep telling me that I have to leave her alone and focus on McCain, because she’s just fine (she’s one of us) and he’s the real bad guy. They keep telling me I have to accept her as just as good as Obama, maybe even better. But when she goes on national television two times in one day with an explicit threat to “obliterate” a nation, and by some readings a promise to do so, I cannot let that stand. I cannot pretend it never occurred. I cannot accept her as an acceptable alternative to a candidate who has not expressed a desire to kill an entire nation. I can’t do it.

And every day I watch liberal writers engage in this horseshit, it makes me sick.

It’s not about me. But it is about war, which is always close. Always at hand. A special case of peace.

*Note: Victimage sounds like exactly what it isn’t, which is only another way of saying scapegoating. Victimage is related to scapegoating, but not the same thing — it’s about casting oneself as a victim, the natural complement to the scapegoating process.