Reply #42: Please Forgive My Tardiness, Mr. Pelsar [View All]

[The Magistrate]

My capabilities for concentration have been somewhat engaged, and otherwise diverted, over the last couple of days. You have raised several interesting points, and the most recent of them is perhaps best dealt with first.

You lay a great deal of stress on the idea that democratic states will not war with one another, and though this is a commonplace observation among the current punditry, it is a very foolish belief, that cannot really find any support in history. To point out that the two instances you raised as exceptions are not very good exceptions, since Argentina at the time of the Falklands War was ruled by a military dictatorship of extraordinary cruelty, and Greece at the time it provoked the Turkish invasion of Cyprus (not only legal but required under international treaty, by the way) was similarly ruled by a brutal military regime, might seem to rather diminish my point, but this does not concern me. The war from which the twentieth century flowed, World War One, was for the most part fought between countries with democratic political systems. Germany, France, and England, the powers that bore the greatest brunt of the military effort in that conflict, all had reasonably democratic systems: France was a republic, England and Germany were constitutional monarchies, and if the constitution restrained the Kaiser somewhat less than the King, his land was far from a police state and his rule far short of unbridled autocracy. As one traces back to the founding of the idea of democracy in elder times, the instances pile ever higher; the early wars of the Roman Republic were mostly against Greco-Italian polities with popular assemblies, or tribal polities with elective kingships, and the wars of the Greek city-states in the Classical period featured many conflicts between states with democratic features, albiet with more or less restricted franchises. The phrase "democracies do not fight one another" is simply a thing that sounds good to say today, particularly to commentators and audiences in democratic polities, but it is without foundation.

Further, the idea that democracies are inherently less likely to war than other sorts of polities is untrue, though it is a staple, for example, of fascist doctrine that democracies are soft things unwilling to fight. The great imperial expansions of the nineteenth century were in by far their greatest part carried out by democratic polities, namely England and France, and these were nothing more or less than wars of predatory aggression waged deliberately for profit against peoples reckoned too weak to defend themselves. The only limitation on a democratic polity's going to war that is not operative on an autocratic one is that the effort must enjoy a good deal of popular support, and this can make a democracy much more dangerous as a fighting animal than many an autocracy. A widely popular effort will be pressed harder, and may be harder to call off; democracies at war tend not to stop until the other fellow is broken to smithereens. Popular judgement in these matters is not always the wisest judgement, and democracies are prone to poor judgement in deciding when and over what to go to war, and in how to prosecute it and how to end it: Athens foundered over just this cause. An autocratic state with a decently calculating strategist for an autocrat may prove to be a more comfortable neighbor, though of course an autocracy with a fool for a chief can be a disaster both for its neighbors and itself.

Thus it seems to me the idea that there would be any special promise of security for Israel in there being democratic rule in an Arab Palestinian state strikes me as false. If hostility, or even war, against Israel were the popular demand of the people of Arab Palestine, what could a democratic government of an Arab Palestinian state do but execute the people's will? If it did not, would they not turn it out at the ballot box in favor of one that would? Similarly, the formula of "Western" ideas of responsibilty and reasonableness strikes me as worthless: it seems to me most questionable that Western states have, in the matter of war and peace, any particular bona fides of either responsibility or reason. There have been perhaps two instances of relative quiesence among the warring of major Western polities, namely, the present day, and the period of about a century and a half after the Thirty Years War, and both of them seem attributable not to any higher developments but simply to having absorbed at least for a time the crudest lessons the utter devestation of a long bout of total war have to teach.

This is why it seems to me the only thing that might procure a reasonable assurance of peace for Israel is for Israel to take active steps to remove so far as is possible for it to do the real grievances of the people of Arab Palestine, for certainly so long as these are felt, democratic rule for that people can certainly be no guarantee of peace. And you have my free admission the effort to do this might not work. But is the only option that has any chance of working, and so it seems to me it had best be tried.

"As long as war is looked upon as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular."