Chapter 3:   Balance of Power

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To become a pacifist is to catch a mental disease that blocks the flow of rational thought and replaces it with angry, self-righteous, pseudo-intellectual visions of war and peace. I caught it from a movie called "All Quiet On The Western Front," the "Platoon" of 1930.

The thing that made the 1930 anti-war movie worth watching was its advertised status as a classic. I hadn’t read the book. Watching the movie seemed to be a painless way of absorbing the essential concepts.

Other classics I was familiar with were either loaded with "big words," which I had learned to use as effective weapons, or "big ideas," which seemed to elude most people my age. Either way, the prospect of being able to watch a classic and beat some poor kid over the head with it if he did something I didn’t like was more than I could resist.

I stayed up late with my brother waiting for the movie to start and recalling the days when we played war. In those games, I never killed "Japs" the way the other kids did because Jap was a nickname for Jasper in the Garrison family with no connection to the racial epithet used so often during WW II. But with all of the WW II anti-Japanese propaganda movies still in circulation in the fifties, when most boys my age were playing war, it was inevitable that the bad guys in many instances would still be the "Japs." Naturally, I had a better time when the Germans were the bad guys. "Killing" Germans was great and glorious fun. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been if I’d known any.

It was news to me that "All Quiet On The Western Front" was made from a German point of view. Talk about your nasty jolts; this was one of the nastiest. Long before the first battle scene, I was beginning to question the whole notion of good guys vs. bad guys. We were the good guys, weren’t we? Sure we were. Then who were the bad guys?

I knew, in a blinding flash of insight, that they weren’t the average boys in uniform on either side. They were the war mongers and politicians who put them in uniform, who started the wars and kept them going with dishonest appeals to patriotism, honor and sacrifice for the greater good. And to think, I was able to get all of that without explicitly being told. Boy, was I smart!

As the story unfolded, I could see that I was right. Dumb school kids, not much older than my brother and I, had gone off to war, too high on patriotic pride and ill-defined visions of glory to see behind the curtain of slick rhetoric that urged them on.

Watching them, I saw myself as a child at play, happily blasting faceless German soldiers to bits. I hadn’t developed a sharp distinction in mind back then between the combatants on either side or the larger issues they stood for. Before "All Quiet On The Western Front," none of those larger issues seemed to mean much anyway. They certainly weren’t interesting in the abstract and, without a solid backbone of something to hold your interest up, nothing can be made to seem particularly important.

The most interesting thing about the young German soldiers was how ordinary they were. Never mind the fact that I was seeing them on television in 1960, through the eyes of a black American adolescent. These young men of 1914, destined to wear the spiked helmets of the Kaiser, were essentially the same as anyone else. I watched them become something quite different as they discovered along with me what war really was: a terrifying, dehumanizing exercise in madness. I watched and I wondered how anything could be worth this. I began to think of the common man as the good guy everyone should care about and war itself as the common enemy of mankind.

How profound! How obvious! How, I wondered, could thinking, caring adults sell war toys and allow their children to play "war," to make of it something noble and wonderfully exciting? The nagging contempt I unjustly harbored for my father came leaping to the fore. It use to be because he had not fought in WW II. Now, it was because he had not learned from his brothers who had just how awful a thing it was.

The word "empathy" wasn’t in my vocabulary at the time, but when I heard the definition shortly thereafter, I felt all over again the powerful emotions of those young German soldiers in "All Quiet On The Western Front." With it came the pride of knowing those universal feelings were universally uncommon.

I wasn’t the only one moved by the old anti-war classic; George was, too. He and I talked all night about it. When sleep finally came, I don’t think it embraced either of us gently.

Having seen the young German soldiers as human beings, we couldn’t avoid the fact that we had not seen them that way before. The First World War was, in that sense, the Vietnam of its era. Americans could see themselves as morally superior beings by virtue of their compassion for "the enemy" they saw on screen and their guilt for what "we" did to them. Even as children, born nearly three decades after "The Great War" ended, my brother and I shared a vague sense of guilt. We felt guilty for having tolerated war for so long. We felt guilty for having failed to see peace as the only sane alternative to war. In short, we were seriously deluded.

The semantic mortar for that visual wall of self-deception was about to crumble.

I was walking home from school after having skipped ahead of my assigned reading in World History to the chapter on WW I. All I could see was "All Quiet On The Western Front" and the need for more people to see it and thereby to understand as I did what war really was. They had only to keep their eyes and ears open, and how could they not do that? Once they saw war for themselves, they would know. Everyone would be a pacifist then. If everyone was a pacifist, there would be no war. That was logic-or the nearest thing to logic that pacifism and the absence of a few boring, untidy facts would allow.

I pictured myself in the forefront of what would now be called a "consciousness raising" effort; Jasper Warren Garrison, famous peace leader, like William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist. Abolition? Yeah! My brain lit up with a glorious "new" concept. Why not a movement to abolish war? Of course!

My war-abolition fantasy was just starting to cook when the light of pacifist reasoning dimmed with the sharp crack of a whip from an unheralded audio memory. A Life magazine illustration of the 18th century African slave trade superimposed itself upon my vision of glory in the noble quest for peace and quickly replaced it altogether.

Just like that, it was gone.

What I saw in my mind was a painting of naked black humanoids chained together in tandem by the neck while armed, white, unquestionably human slave traders herded them along a winding jungle trail. All kinds of messages were tied up in the way that scene was conceived and executed by the Life artist. But the one that came out of the spontaneous coupling of imagination and memory about peace and slavery was one of winners and losers in a contest between pacifists and slavers.

War and peace were opposite stages of conflict resolution with any number of steps that could be taken in between to head off a clash of arms. They were not alternative ways of resolving conflict. Indeed, war was a contest and peace was whatever the people holding the whips at the end of the contest said it was. Peace terms, unacceptable to someone with the will and the means to challenge them, were the reasons for wars. Whatever the contending parties resolved, at whatever stage, by whatever means was always determined by the final tilt in the balance of power between them.

That was the sorry truth of the matter. A peace movement could work only if it held the balance of power over all belligerents or potential belligerents in the world while resolving the differences between them. No movement which saw peace as an alternative to war and itself as the only sane alternative to the military could play such a role in conflict resolution. In a world teeter-tottering between the forces of freedom and the forces of tyranny, the success of such a movement would tilt the balance of power in favor of the tyrants.

If my "crack-of-the-whip" awakening hadn’t shown me that when it did, I would not have had long to wait. A special broadcast was coming up on television, another hard visual lesson in war and peace....

Auschwitz. Armed guards. Emaciated prisoners. Gas chambers, ovens, cruel medical experiments, corpse piled on corpse. Indescribable horror.

Before the 1960 television broadcast of those ghastly scenes from recent history, the network had given plenty of warning about them. The warnings could be expressed only in words. No words could have adequately prepared me for Auschwitz and all of the Nazi death camps it symbolized.

Though no words could describe Hitler’s "final solution," there must have been words to explain it. From that point on I was doomed to seek them out. I already knew more than I wanted to, from a feeling I got when looking through the family album.

I knew about the evil force in human affairs that sought the domination of one group over another and the destruction of anyone like my eccentric aunt and Jewish uncle who would not or could not conform. I hadn’t yet learned of how well it worked for popular movements like Italian fascism, Japanese imperialism and German National Socialism, with a strong peace movement on the opposing side. I hadn’t yet learned of Germany’s Adolph Hitler and Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain putting Czechoslovakia on the bargaining table in Munich to get what they each wanted most.

The British prime minister got a promise of peace and world applause for the success of his mission. The German chancellor got Czechoslovakia without a fight. Chamberlain’s peace offering at the 1938 Munich peace conference was Hitler’s green light to invade Poland.

On my way to learning the lessons of Munich, which the lessons of Vietnam were to supersede in the next ten years or so, I learned things that the peace movement’s lessons must ignore to have any semblance of validity. The lesson of Munich, of course, was that appeasement doesn’t work. It only encourages more aggression.

Most Americans born between 1925 and 1955 were taught that in high school. What we were not taught, and what the best known authorities on the Vietnam War consistently fail to recall about Munich in respect to Vietnam, is that "appeasement" was not always a dirty word. It was in the `30s, just as the so called "lessons of Vietnam" have been since the `70s, an "educated" strategy for avoiding another war of a particular, unpopular kind. It was an "enlightened" application of Western Europe’s lessons of The Great War, the war to end all wars.

Appeasement was consistent with the view that war, as a practical means of achieving political ends, had been made obsolete by the methods and means of modern mass destruction. It was consistent with the view of war from the trenches and shell craters of the modern battlefield where the remembered and imagined stench of death was thick and the politicians responsible for it were nowhere to be seen. Appeasement was consistent with the idea that only a small clique of greedy international war mongers could win a war because nothing could be won which would justify the cost. It made sense to people who had experienced the fighting directly, who experienced it vicariously through people they knew or through people they felt close to in movies like "All Quiet On The Western Front."

One argument I read about in my 9th grade World History book which favored the appeasement strategy for peace stayed with me like a misspelled "mother" tattoo. It was the same argument used by American "peace activists" to justify Ho Chi Minh’s murderous infiltration of South Vietnam and Saddam Hussein’s murderous occupation of Kuwait. It held that Nazi Germany could not have been the aggressor in the territories it seized initially because Germany-never mind the Nazis-had a rightful claim to them to begin with. And if there was some dispute about that, was it worth killing and dying for? Was it worth another Great War?

With visions of Lew Ayers in "All Quiet On The Western Front" to help you think with, you, too, may have arrived at the 1938 sellout of Czechoslovakia with no emotional choice but to be grateful for it. You would have had to assume, however, that the German National Socialists, commonly known as "Nazis," would be appeased and that would be the end of it. That’s where things get stinky.

How the hell could anybody assume that Adolph Hitler’s ambitious, aggressive, militaristic, racist, one-party police state would be appeased? How could anybody not know that something heinous was in store for the Nazis’ conquered minorities, the oddballs who were not adaptable to a well ordered Nazi society?

I had to go no further than my, World History book to find out all I needed to know about Auschwitz, though I don’t recall it being mentioned there. I do remember the Treaty of Versailles, Mein Kampf, the Brownshirts and the Rineland. I remember the Nuremberg Laws, the isolationist/interventionist debates... and I remember Munich. I remember all of the steps leading to the death camp gates.

Our World History class never got around to studying either world war, which didn’t have anything to do with my study of them. This was my first conclusion: World War II began in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles, the peace terms ending WW I.

After creating the environment for a twentieth century Napoleon in Germany, the enforcers of the peace terms left him and his Brownshirts pretty much alone. Convinced that arms and armies were the cause of war, they deliberately cut back on both as Hitler rearmed and mobilized for war. As if that wasn’t enough, they let Nazi Germany and its fellow aggressor nations know in every way they could that they would be given free reign as long as the aggressors left the peace keepers in peace. All in all, it was a combination of military aggressiveness and diplomatic permissiveness that made another world war inevitable. The bad guys could not have done it alone.

With or without the benefit of hindsight, it seemed to me that no one could have honestly missed what the Axis powers were up to in the 1930s with their uninvited troops in their neighbors’ backyards. Looking at the reasons put forth to aid or not to aid the embattled opponents of Nazi rule in Europe, one argument I hadn’t heard before struck me as the overriding one. It came out of the Congressional debate over Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease proposal. It maintained that a great power like the United States could not be neutral in a war involving another great power. Even if we did nothing, the practical effect would be the same as giving aid to whichever European power was the strongest.

Throughout that life-or-death debate for freedom’s last chance in Europe, the Nazis were the strongest and everybody knew it, just as everybody in 1993 would know that the Serbs were the strongest in Bosnia. By the slimmest possible margin, the 76th freely elected Congress of the United States voted against the Nazis. We were content to leave their Italian and Japanese partners pretty much alone.

It took another year for the Japanese Imperial Navy to cast the deciding vote at Pearl Harbor against the expanding totalitarian empire of Japan. Even then, the vote against them in Congress was not unanimous. A pacifist voted, no.

When I saw the full implications of that decision-making process, I was ashamed for my country. Moreover, I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a matter of national shame that a massive Japanese military strike against us, followed by a German declaration of war against us, was needed to make us fight them. Why weren’t we ashamed to have acted only out of fear for our own survival after failing to act out of principle when the survival of other free countries was in jeopardy? Why wasn’t it enough that we knew what the Axis was and what it was doing and what it would continue to do for as long as the balance of power was tilted in its favor?

In case you haven’t noticed, what we did before Dec. 7, 1941, what we didn’t do and why are answered in effect by the peace movement’s lessons of Vietnam. That is to say, the peace movement’s lessons of WW I and Vietnam are not lessons at all. They are different words for the same philosophy of war and peace that gave us the death camps of Poland, the killing fields of Cambodia and the "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia.

The real lesson of every major war in the 20th century where tyranny prevailed, if only briefly, was that the bad guys needed help from the other side. The balance of power that shifted in their favor for success in battle had as much to do with the prior success of the peace movement in limiting effective opposition to them as anything they did themselves.

Born as I was in 1946, I could not have reached adulthood without hearing about the East/West balance of power in the Cold War and knowing what that meant in terms of WW II, the Korean War and the future.

This is how it was: The world beyond the North American continent was torn violently asunder by the Second World War. Afterward, only two powers were capable of reassembling the pieces: one led by the communist dictator Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, the other by Harry S. Truman of the United States. Truman could not afford to repeat the mistake of 1919 that made Hitler’s National Socialism so appealing to the defeated masses. To shore up the military defense of the West, he also had to provide massive assistance to the prostrate victors, which, with the help of some expedient rewriting of history, included France.

The French government used much of what it got from us to restore its colonialist rule in Indochina. It even collaborated at one point with Ho Chi Minh, the ruthless, charismatic, French-educated, media-wise founder of the Indochinese Communist Party, to kill their mutual rivals for power. Before the Korean War, for which there was no American precedent in terms of fighting for principle, neither Vietnam nor Korea were high priority concerns for President Truman who still had Germany and Japan to worry about. They too could have gone communist in partnership with Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Truman’s priorities were, quite properly, set in the second half of the `40s with an eye toward limiting Stalin’s hand in reconstructing the planet’s future. And that was no minor consideration since Stalin was more than a tyrant, he was a tyrant with power, an exterminator of freedom and people without equal in the planet’s past. He was the bankroller and role model for aspiring communist dictators everywhere.

Mao Tse-tung was soon to outdo both Hitler and Stalin in the mass extermination of misfits, enemies, and critics of the state. But even before 1949, when Mao painted China red with communism and blood and Moscow set off its first atomic blast, Truman had good reason to view the spread of communism as a grave danger to freedom. Notwithstanding the extent to which The House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joe McCarthy’s self-serving witch hunts of the early `50s confused the issue for the next 35 years, the threat was real. The communists were at least as dangerous as they were. The Munich analogy was a good one and the lesson of Munich had not been completely forgotten

At the start of the Cold War, the United States held the balance of power in the world with its vast military and economic resources. The atomic bomb was also used with some effect as a psychological weapon, which is all the damn thing was ever good for. Truman dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only to force Japan’s surrender, but to show Joseph Stalin that he was crazy enough to drop it on Moscow if pushed too far.

A credible threat of war is war. Truman’s dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was a battle in the war against Stalinism that he won. Some he lost by failing to fight or to offer a credible threat that he would. When a Cold War American president lost his credibility to defend freedom, people by the tens of millions lost their freedom. No one knows how many lost their lives.

That’s where "The Domino Theory" comes in. The Domino Theory was often ridiculed in our media for its "monolithic" view of communism and disregard for indigenous nationalist aspirations, like Ho Chi Minh’s, in Vietnam. The point of all this background stuff that I know you know is to put Vietnam in the global, postwar context of superpower rivalry where it belongs. When President Eisenhower first articulated the concept, many things had happened and were happening in countries all over the globe which paralleled the "falling dominoes" of unchallenged Axis aggression. A fall to the communists in any of those places could have set off a succession of falls to communists with only token regard for indigenous nationalist aspirations. In other words, the world balance of power could have shifted to Moscow.

Maintaining our military credibility for the balance of power between the totalitarian forces of the East and the anti-totalitarian forces of the West was what the Cold War was all about. It’s what the Korean War was about. It’s why we had to fight the communists in Vietnam.

During the heyday of the Vietnam peace movement, portions of President Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address were used to "document" something called "hubris." If you look that up in The Second College Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, you will find this definition: "Excessive pride; arrogance." It’s from the Greek word meaning "violence," and if you have had occasion to study Greek Mythology in college, you know why. If you haven’t, it will suffice to say that hubris is used to describe what happened to Oedipus and Agamemnon, powerful kings whose overestimation of their wisdom and power led them to violent ends.

The words that the peace movement used to document John F. Kennedy’s hubris were, "We will pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe..." The quote usually ends there, followed by the obvious fact that there are limits to what American power can accomplish and reasons why our efforts in Vietnam were ill-conceived and immoral.

Putting aside the nonsense that there was no limit to what Ho’s sponsors and minions were willing and able to do to achieve their goals, the rest of President Kennedy’s message should also be mentioned. What was it that the United States was willing to do so much for?

"...to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

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Copyright © 1994 by Jasper Garrison

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