No War is Inevitable
Comments: 4
There’s an awful lot I’d like to say about the apparently imminent and utterly sordid U.S. invasion of Iraq, but it wouldn’t be anything that you hadn’t read elsewhere. And anyway, not having the tightest grip on the reins of invective, I’m not sure I’d be able to stop once I got going.
The way that any military action has been made to seem inevitable is a stunning display of media acquiescence and made me think of these two paragraphs from a 1985 novel by Richard Powers called Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance —
But was the war necessary? A.J.P. Taylor observed after the fact that “No war is inevitable until it breaks out.” This lucid epigram makes a formidable effort to preserve the best of humanity—reason—from its worst, fatalism. But one might as well say that no one ever got hurt jumping from a tall building until hitting the pavement. In an environment where Austria-Hungary thought that the Germans assumed that Russia believed that war between Serbia and Austria-Hungary was inevitable, not to mention France, Britain, and Turkey all rushing to position themselves advantageously so as not to be preempted by others’ positioning, Taylor’s statement seems snarled in a circular tangle: “No war is inevitable until one or more parties believes it to be inevitable, or until one or more parties believes that another believes it to be inevitable.”
Social developments often collect such a massy inertia that years pass before a tendency shows its results. The private automobile provides a good illustration. Ford perfected the under-five-hundred-dollar automobile in the first decade of the century, but it took another seventy years for this country to find itself hostage to oil-rich nations, increasingly susceptible to respiratory and oncological diseases, unable to get from A to B except through private ownership, and every fifteen years acquiring enough highway fatalities to level the city of Houston. Similarly, the war may have resulted from some agent long since vanished, caused by the past, but seemingly inevitable to the present. Perhaps the dead dictate necessity to the living.
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Posted to General Rants • 2003.03.17 (Mon) • 18:44
Comments
Posted by niji 2003.03.17, 18:54
this is wonderful passage. thanks for reminding us of it. thank you very much.
Posted by Mary Beth 2003.03.18, 07:45
Thanks Jeremy. that was great. I’m dreading seeing the Prez tonight. He can talk all he wants but he doesn’t care if any of us are convinced or not. And we’ve known that from the start
Posted by S. Patrick Eaton 2003.03.19, 12:36
Ah, c’mon Jeremy, let it rip! We could use a lot more invective about this particular issue. It should be clear to the world that this sort of thing is not acceptable. We’re certainly not going to hear any such opinions from the ever-malleable U.S. media.
is it ture you can’t stop war
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