Several of my remaining friends and I are somewhat familiar with what has been happening in San Francisco during recent weeks. We were anti-war activists in New York 65 years ago, and our memories were jogged by a recent Washington Post column about the organizers of the current anti-war rallies. We organized rallies in the late 1930s to protest the president’s efforts to involve us in the European war, were occasionally arrested at demonstrations, and so forth.
The many Jews among us had the sense that our religious tradition made room for the principle of “obligatory war.” Maimonides had limited that principle to a war necessary “to deliver us from an enemy attacking us.” Yeshayahu Liebowitz, a religious scholar and refugee from the Nazis, further described that Jewish tradition as “the rejection of war as a value at the same time that it is recognized as necessary in certain circumstances…for the preservation of values without which life is not worth living.”
But in the anti-war movement of the ’30s, we had a special ideological perspective on what was going on. We knew that Jews were oppressed in Nazi Germany. But we also knew about the depths of anti-Semitism and other oppressions in the United States; and, in my radical circle at least, we knew that Jews were severely oppressed in the Soviet Union as well.
We believed that war was the hellish mark of a civilization gone berserk, and that it could not be justified — unless it were waged by us against those several imperialist powers, among whom we saw no distinction.
In the several years that followed, events turned many of us around. Having left the campus, we met a lot of the people in the real world who were often angry about injustice in this country, but, uncluttered with abstract ideology, they more clearly understood the distinctions between America and the tyrannical countries their families had fled.
At the same time, word was getting out about the murder camps in a Germany that was marching to victory. It became clear to most of us what had to be done first, before it was too late to set things right in this country or elsewhere.
We still hated war as much as ever. But at long last, most of us had learned to make the critical distinctions between the human values of a liberal democracy with all its serious faults that needed correction and the inhuman, incorrigibly reactionary values of an aggressive tyranny. It was hoped that Americans had lost the innocence under which we had suffered.
But Michael Kelly, in the Jan. 22 Washington Post, pointed out that the recent “marches in Washington and San Francisco were chiefly sponsored by ANSWER” (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). That organization, he said, supported the Beijing slaughter at Tiananmen Square, Saddam Hussein, North Korea, the war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and the Palestinian terrorists.
For ANSWER, the enemy is the liberal democracies, especially America — and Israel. At the Washington anti-war rally, the crowd cheered the speaker who said, “The real terrorists have always been the United Snakes of America,” and the speaker who said the difference between President Bush and Saddam is that “Saddam was elected,” while Bush says to Americans: “I want you to die for Israel.”
Of course, most of those who attend these current rallies are not members of ANSWER, or even fully aware of it. But the same could have been said of those who attended our rallies in the 1930s. In both cases, they have been driven by understandable anti-war impulses — but they have been pushed to ignore the critical distinction between liberal democracies and aggressive tyrannies.
They also have been pushed to ignore the distinction between wars that are obligatory and those that are not — and we have had both in our history. After all, the main debate about any given war is not between war-lovers and war-haters. There are few war-lovers among us. At best, it is a debate among the war-haters about the most effective way to prevent war, especially when aggressive tyrannies and liberal democracies confront each other.
The world is at as dangerous a point as it was in the 1930s. It is always necessary to examine the decisions of our policymakers, to avoid triumphalism and mistaken strategies.
Protests are often in order, but only those that include sober debates about those distinctions — which the cartoonish slogans and hidden agendas of so many of these rallies have obscured. They dumb down both the protests and the ability of American minds to deal with foreign affairs.
It is discouraging to see that so many of these protests are no wiser than they were 65 years ago.of us had learned to make the critical distinctions between the human values of a liberal democracy with all its serious faults that needed correction and the inhuman, incorrigibly reactionary values of an aggressive tyranny. It was hoped that Americans had lost the innocence under which we had suffered.
But Michael Kelly, in the Jan. 22 Washington Post, pointed out that the recent “marches in Washington and San Francisco were chiefly sponsored by ANSWER” (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). That organization, he said, supported the Beijing slaughter at Tiananmen Square, Saddam Hussein, North Korea, the war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and the Palestinian terrorists.
For ANSWER, the enemy is the liberal democracies, especially America — and Israel. At the Washington anti-war rally, the crowd cheered the speaker who said, “The real terrorists have always been the United Snakes of America,” and the speaker who said the difference between President Bush and Saddam is that “Saddam was elected,” while Bush says to Americans: “I want you to die for Israel.”
Of course, most of those who attend these current rallies are not members of ANSWER, or even fully aware of it. But the same could have been said of those who attended our rallies in the 1930s. In both cases, they have been driven by understandable anti-war impulses — but they have been pushed to ignore the critical distinction between liberal democracies and aggressive tyrannies.
They also have been pushed to ignore the distinction between wars that are obligatory and those that are not — and we have had both in our history. After all, the main debate about any given war is not between war-lovers and war-haters. There are few war-lovers among us. At best, it is a debate among the war-haters about the most effective way to prevent war, especially when aggressive tyrannies and liberal democracies confront each other.
The world is at as dangerous a point as it was in the 1930s. It is always necessary to examine the decisions of our policymakers, to avoid triumphalism and mistaken strategies.
Protests are often in order, but only those that include sober debates about those distinctions — which the cartoonish slogans and hidden agendas of so many of these rallies have obscured. They dumb down both the protests and the ability of American minds to deal with foreign affairs.
It is discouraging to see that so many of these protests are no wiser than they were 65 years ago.