Kirk on War

[arisbe]

"What was our motive at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a country already pleading to surrender? We try to tell ourselves that it was to 'save American lives'; but in our hearts we know that if our primary concern really had been for American lives we would not have prolonged the war in Germany by our insistence on unconditional surrender; perhaps, after all, our primary concern ought not to be for our own lives, but for justice and mercy under God. If our primary concern had been for our own lives, we would not have gone to war at all. In plain fact, our motives for destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mixed, but chief among them seems to be these three: a desire, based on sheer expediency, to overawe the Russians; an unhallowed desire for vengeance; and the ferocious intoxication of pure power. I say these things not out of any desire to revive dead grudges, but to emphasize that we Americans now are face to face with the problem of power; we are looking upon the stony countenance of Medusa. After all our humantarian bragging, in the course of the war, we behaved precisely as we accused our enemies of behaving. I am afraid that we must confess, now, that Americans have no pecular exemption from Sin, as a people, and that pure power, in our hands, is as dreadful as pure power in the hands of any other nation.[...] What conservatives can do is to seek for means to prevent the employment of this power by any tight little circle of men who might judge it expedient to annihilate some obdurate opponents, the end justifying the means. A handful of indivuals, some of them quite unused to moral responsibilities on such a scale, made it their business to extirpate the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; we must make it our business to curtail the possibility of such snap decisions, taken simply on the assumptions of worldly wisdom. And the conservative can urge upon his nation a policy of patience and prudence. A 'preventive' war, whether or not it might be successful in the field -- and that is a question much in doubt -- would be morally ruinous to us. There are circumstances under which it is not only more honorable to lose than to win, but quite truly less harmful, in the ultimate providence of God."

Russell Kirk, A Program for Conservatives (1954 and 1962) pp. 267-268. From Permanent Things, the RK list on Yahoo.

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When I wonder why I still call myself a Conservative, let me recall this.

Comments

[dap6000.livejournal.com]

i miss real conservatives. they were good people. and of course they're still around, you just don't see them on TV (or in office) very much anymore.

You Are...

[publius-aelius.livejournal.com]

...a "conservative," rather than a fascist--which means that you very likely will never be able again in your life to vote for a Republican Presidential candidate.

A lot of people think the explanation for this is found in big-government economic and financial policies, as they were gradually adopted by the Republican Party. I don't; as a former Southerner, I am very much aware of how neatly the policies of massive government expenditures have sorted well with the nuanced racism and the fetishizing of uniforms and military adventures that are the spice of life for "Dixiecrats." Nixon began the "chicken-frying" of Amerikan politics in order to restore "freedom of choice" (NO "FORCED BUSING"!) to the Amerikan South, and Reagan finished it by demonizing the government for every kind of activity except those favoured by the "military industrial complex." Barry Goldwater wouldn't recognise the modern Republican Party as "conservative," and William F. Buckley clearly doesn't any more.

George W. Bush is NOT a traditional Republican. He is, instead, a Texas "Dixiecrat." Goldwater was a fine libertarian gentleman, who simply didn't understand the politics of "containment" and the nuclear age.

[kirwar4face.livejournal.com]

I often think that without the awful example of Hiroshima, we might have lobbed a few missles at the Russians just to see what those babies would do in a real fight.

[thecatinside.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I am not a conservative, but this is a position I can certainly understand and agree with.