Michael Walsh: "war may be hell but it is often necessary"

 

From the epilogue of Michael Walsh's Last Stands (Why Men Fight When All Is Lost): Echoing the Protest Warriors' tongue-in-cheek T-shirt "War has never solved anything (except for ending Nazism, Fascism, slavery, etc…)", Michael Walsh writes that

 … war may be hell but it is often necessary. This may be regrettable, but unless one is a member of a suicide cult, it does neither an individual nor a nation any good to deny. In our iconoclastioc era, in which a segment of the American population thinnks it is somehow cathartic to tear down statues of great men of the past because they lacked the foresight to see how their actions and attitudes might play out hundreds or even thousands of years in the future, there can be no disagreement with transitory orthodoxy. The animated warriors of the "social justice" movement are quite brave when confronting inanimate objects; one wonders how far this bravado would extend to an existential threat. Let's hope we never have to find out, although one suspects they would suddenly discover the joys of conscientious objection, or a "Higher loyalty" to nonviolence over their preferred goal of international, borderless brotherhood.  

… The Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in Paris in 1928, bound its signers to renounce war. … Eleven years later, World War II broke out, rendering the treaty nugatory and resulting in the disappearance of several of the signatories. 

 … Contemporary pacifists and feminists will argue that war is the result of "toxic masculinity," and that in a female-dominated world disputes will be amicably settled by tribal councils of conciliation and jawboning. Why, then, are contemporarty feminists so adamant about women in the military? Why do they insist, against all historical and empirical evidence, that women are the equals of men in every respect, including physical strength and and the nature of their enotions? Their ideal, the now-obsolete United Nations, is a monument on the East River to the naïveté of Kellogg-Briand. What has the UN brought us? Wars that drag on forever with "peacekeepers" in blue helmets there to referee, a bloated bureaucracy occupying valuable Manhattan real estate, and outbreaks of rape and exploitation in various hot zones around the world. Winston Churchill never said anything stupider than "jaw-jaw is better than war-war" — rich coming from a man who also said (of his experience on the North-West Frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan), "Nothing on life is so exhilarating than to be shot at without result."

 … Santayana's oft-quoted aphorism, "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it," is in a way supererogatory; the past will recur whether we remember it or not. Remembering it and learning from it, however, at least gives us a fighting chance.

Related: From 10 years ago: Greatest of all warriors on earth, the American soldier is capable of fighting fiercely, loving gently, living nobly, and forgiving totally