Fightin' Words Thursday, October 16, 2003

Hi again. A quote at length from Hanson, on Uncle Billy Sherman.

It is a hard thing for contemporary liberalism to envision war as not always evil, but as sometimes very necessary--and very necessarily brutal if great evil is to disappear. ... The real dilemma of Sherman, it seems to me, is rather to understand a man who wrote of the need to slaughter hundreds of thousands but killed very few, and with real reluctance. Sherman, also like Patton, professed his distrust of racial equality; yet, he was especially kind to blacks, and very unkind to Southern plantation racists. He wrote of the need to destoy the confederacy root and branch, yet he sought to extend the most generous peace and help to a defeated South. As blacks themselves acknowledged, Sherman did more to "cut them loose" than any abolitionist. The man had contradictions aplenty, but the divide between what he said and did reflects mostly positively, not negatively, on his character. Moderns especially fail to appreciate that the visionaries of a conservative society sometimes profess racism to justify their own moderation; they often claim to be hardened war-makers to make their own clemency palatable to self and similarly dour others.

...

The late twentieth century has increasingly come to declare all war evil. Since peace is considered the natural state of relations, we live in an era of "conflict resolution" and "peace studies" in which some degree of moral guilt is freely assessed equally, both to those who kill to advance evil and those who kill to end it, to those who are aggressive and to those who resist aggrandizement. Regardless of cause or circumstances, we all in the end must become "victims" of those who have the greater power, which transcends national boundaries--politicians, corporations, the military. Indeed, "evil" itself is to be seen as a relative idea--the very thought would have terrified Sherman--a construct whose "truth" is determined by those who hold power for the moment and thus set up courts of inquiry, write our histories, teach our classes, and maintain postwar armies of occupation.

Yet there is always a timeless, absolute difference between slavery and freedom, and those who battle for abolition and those who kill to defend slavery are qualitatively different and can be recognized as such.

In those lines is the best of us, and the worst of us. Which is which? As usual, I will elide...

@ 9:56:00 PM,

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