Toy Soldiers - Peace At Any Price, The Fanciful Dreams Of A Hopeless Idealist

Artemis Jones was a child of the post-war generation a woman who grew up in the heady times of American political hegemony.  The world was American in spirt, philosophy, will, and ethos.  Germany and Japan had been roundly defeated and the Soviets shown what would happen to them if they overstepped their geopolitical interests.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war with Japan to a consummate close, but more importantly they showed the Russians what to expect if they got out of line. 

 

Fourth of July parades meant something.  They were exuberant expressions or native patriotism.  There were few dissenters in post-war America, a few residual socialists in Wisconsin and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but by and large the Fourth was a universal celebration of national pride. 

Of course that nationalistic euphoria could not be sustained - the world has a way of intruding on idealistic hopefulness - and soon America was mired in an unwinnable war in Korea, followed by a disastrous misadventure in Vietnam, on the heels of which came the half-hearted military excursions in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

After the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad Square, George Bush, tricked out in flight suit on the decks of an American aircraft carrier, declared victory, and time for the Iraqi people to determine their own, particular path to freedom and democracy. 

Whistlin' Dixie it not unexpectedly turned out, as Abolhassan Banisadr and his Islamist militias took to the streets to fill the power vacuum.  Leaving the political future to 'the Iraqi people', meant turning the country over to venal, self-interested terrorist groups, but the hard lifting had been carried out, and was time for Iraqis to man up. The result - political chaos. Extended military rule was proposed - stay in Iraq until true structural reform had been effected and all seeds of Islamic intent neutered - but America was having none of it. Time to move on. 

The same was true in Afghanistan - after years of a punishing, unwinnable war against the Taliban, let the people decide, American troops were withdrawn, and the country went back to a medieval caliphate. 

So, Artemis Jones, despite her earlier pride in America's defeat of fascism and imperialism, changed her tune.  War was no way to solve disputes, and was only a regressive return to Paleolithic barbarism. She had become a Neville Chamberlain 'Peace at any price' pacifist. 

 

It was hard for her college friends, all of whom had become conservative over time  - the old adage, 'Give a liberal enough time and he will become conservative' was never more true of her Seven Sisters, privileged social elite who had had their dalliance with progressivism but who had returned to the fold - to understand how Artemis, icon of intellectual brilliance and philosophical insight at Vassar, had come so beholden to a faded, discredited philosophy. 

'It's the right thing to do', Artemis said, 'the only thing', and she joined with her Yale colleagues in following the Reverend William Sloan Coffin in his One World peace movement - disarmament at all costs, reductions in force, and a return to civil sanity.  A failed incentive of course, given history's lessons of persistent, perennial aggression.  The Hundred Years War was just a trifle compared to the bloody military escapades of Genghis Khan and his hundreds of thousands of brutal-minded cavalry; and an afterthought to Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot, responsible for millions of deaths of innocent civilians in mindless attempts to establish communist hegemony. 

One would have thought that Artemis and her fellows would have come to their senses by the end of the Twentieth Century, one of the bloodiest in human history; but no, such is the persistence of idealism in the human breast - a simple, unproven belief in the natural goodness of Man and the ultimate outing of a verdant, compassionate, considerate, harmonious world. 

But no...she was as deeply committed to pacifism and the eventual coming of Utopia as fundamental Christians are about The Second Coming.  The world would see, sooner rather than later, that war, warfare, armed conflict, hostility, and competition are only social artifacts placed erroneously in the way of social and moral progress. 

When asked about WWII - after all a world dominated by genocidal, autocratic, hegemonic regimes could not in any way be acceptable - she demurred, happy with the outcome but retrospectively hopeful that a more peaceful solution could have been found.  She remained resolute that violence, no matter how appealingly logical it might seem at the time, only leads to more violence.  

It was her goal in life to assure that such world wars would never happen; but when questioned about powerful, unconcerned, and unintimidated regimes like those in Russia and China and whether military force could ever by contemplated, she once again demurred.  If we worked hard enough with enough moral authority, war would never be needed. 

The world is at war - Ukraine, Iran, Palestine, and the racist, Islamic incursions in Nigeria, North Africa, and the Middle East.  Western Europe, thanks to its ignoble assumptions of diversity, is awash in separatist, militant, radical Islam - a movement which if not deterred and neutered, will most certainly end in violence.  China is ready to unleash historic aggression against Taiwan if it continues to refuse re-integration with the Communist mainland.  Russia is as vigilant for an Islamic resurgence in the Caucasus. 

Yet and still Artemis held firmly to her principles of non-violence. Unless some stood up against the persistent and increasingly violent aggression everywhere, it would go on unabated.  Only she and her pacifist colleagues stood in the way between world mayhem and international civil order. 

The American Left in its increasing use of the term 'Hitler' to describe any conservative policy or political stance has done more to distort historical reality than any academic revisionist. The war against Hitler and Naziism was a just war - not only because it defied Hitler's overt attempt to create a thousand year Reich which extended from East to West, but because of his genocidal desire to rid the world of Jews.  Now that everyone with views opposing the progressive Left is condemned as a Hitlerian racist, evil and satanically destructive, the war to destroy Naziism loses its existential validity and makes 'peace at any price' acceptable once again. 

Artemis had trouble justifying the 9/11 terrorists - Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people and their denial of civil rights was certainly the root cause for Islamic frustration and anger, but such a bold, blatant attack on a civilian target was questionable at the very least. 

She never once withdrew her criticism of Israel for its armed response to Hamas terrorism or its attempts to eliminate Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.  Israel was and always will be seen as the racist aggressor.  The war in Gaza was entirely and unequivocally Israel's fault. 

Jesus was a pacifist and so were Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King - saints in the liberal pantheon, prophets of right, justice, and goodness - and their portraits were place above the mantlepiece in Artemis' living room.  Their spirit of universal brotherhood should never be forgotten. 

The best that can be said of all three is that their influence at least mitigated the horrors of war; but history shows that they had no influence whatsoever.  Not only were the Crusades sent to Jerusalem to kill Muslims in Jesus' name, but India was home to one of the most bloody communal violence the world had ever seen before Rwanda.  Millions of Hindus and Muslims were slaughtered in the name of religious equity.  Islam is not the religion of peace but the religion of violence.  Death to the infidel rings loud and clear now more than ever. 

Conservatives know that peace can be achieved in only two ways - armed standoff such as that in the Cold War where mutually assured nuclear destruction kept missiles in their silos for fifty years; and Pax Romana when one empire, the Roman, held absolute, complete sway. Peace as a concept is only academic, a result not of goodwill or best intentions but the result of geopolitics. 

Artemis sat in, knelt, marched, and protested for all her livelong days without one whit of impact or result.  Despite her many decades of peace at any price, the world has continued without interruption its violent ways.  Conflicts are still resolved in violence.  As Mao Tse Tung famously said, 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. 

There are special plots in every cemetery for deluded, ingenuous, fabulists - idealists who no matter what the evidence or chronicles of history keep on believing that peace has a chance, that it can be the prevailing ethos of humanity, that it is possible.  The rest of the graves are for those who soldiered on in war and peace, taking life for the 'nasty, brutish, and short' sojourn that it is.