Murderous Mendacity

We justify war on the basis of what we perceive as “injustice beyond the ordinary.” Sometimes we’re right. Given its result, we can justify the American Civil War, though the abolition of slavery was not that war’s original intent. And even though we were not fully aware of Nazi Germany’s atrocities when we decided to enter the Second Great War, if we had known of them we should have been compelled to take up arms. Others of our wars were not so justifiable as those, and if we had known the truth of the reasons behind them, we should not have become involved.

Perhaps, though, we ask the impossible if we demand that all the people should be informed of all the facts before deciding significant issues. We are after all a republic in which elected representatives make decisions of the war-or-peace sort for us. Most of us have neither the time nor the intellect to devote to an assessment of the relevant issues. But even if time were afforded us, and even if all of us were reasonably educated concerning foreign affairs, our ability to determine the truth of the matter would still be impaired by the fact that we are often compelled by unconscious forces to believe the lie and doubt the truth. Difficulties far greater than those facing Pavlov’s dog face those whose “bells” are not mere bells but are plausible theories indelibly imprinted upon their minds. We love our freedom, and would be willing to die for it, but let the word “freedom” be attached to broad expanses of our neuronal territory, let it be emotionally interleaved with all our conceptions – not merely the most fundamental – and we will find ourselves dying for causes that have little or nothing to do with actual freedom, ours or anyone else’s.

When, for example, the word is repeated to us like a meditator’s mantra to justify the ambitions of deluded politicians, it is only by an almost superhuman effort that we ask whether an Iraqi would, to obtain his freedom, be willing to be killed by a foreigner who may be driven as much by a need for the approbation of his constituents (or contributors) as by a genuine care for the Iraqi, his wife, their sisters, brothers, and children – those the foreigner must slaughter in order to obtain the Iraqi’s freedom for him. And even if we were to ask ourselves that question, perhaps the word “freedom” will have been so positively charged by our own history, that we would answer for the Iraqi – who had no say in the matter – that he would surely welcome death if only his heirs could be assured a portion of that blessed freedom. It would perhaps never occur to us to wonder if the word “freedom” means to the Iraqi what it means to us.