VIEWPOINT
Sanity through lunacy
GEORGE GALE
The second lunatic adventure, like the first, was the pretext for much wishful thinking that it would be desirable to put a poet on the moon since he would think up something better to say than the genuine original all- American guys have thus far contrived to garble. There may be something in this, although I incline to doubt it. Poets are usually sensible fellows. A kind of parallel that comes to mind is the remark I've heard attributed to Tennyson (whose look into the future far as human eye could see was no mean feat of prophecy, and places him firmly among the precursors of modern science-fiction) who, having been shown all around the Great Exhibition of 1851 in his opacity as Poet Laureate, said: 'What I want is a bottle of Bass'.
There is no need to go to the moon to marvel at the aptitudes of men for making machines, to brood that we are dust on an earth that itself is a speck of derelict dust in empty space, or to reflect with mind's pain upon the follies and cruelties of men. All this is better done at home than on the oon, and better come to that at home than upon mountain peaks or in deserts or ithin cells. What it would be most fitting or us to do, at home and much of the ime, is to start reflecting more upon our allies and our cruelties. We would do well o think continually of men who are truly mall, like the men who carried out the inkville massacre, and the victims, and hose who seek to condone or to exculpate, nd those, too, who order or who permit, nd those who condemn as blindly as those ho justify, and not least ourselves.
I used to support the Vietnam war and he process of changing my mind was long nd complicated as such processes usually re. Visits to the wretched country gradually
onvinced me that the Americans, having 'mmitted their ground troops, could never cure a lasting victory; and also that the ericans, largely through these ground oops. were corrupting that which ostensibly ey were preserving. It was not the sudden ock of Pinkville that brought about this angel mind. -But certainly I would hope at. had my mind not been changed before knew of Pinkville, it would have then been
hanged. What I find astounding are the rguments of the apologists who take the es that these sort of things happen and at. because they happen, they should not allowed to obscure the virtue of the erican presence in Vietnam. I sometimes think that if enough politi- ans and opinion-makers and mytho- elsts could be sent off to the moon, and
impelled to spend a fortnight or so there ntemplating not the indescribably dreary ()logical litter they saw at their feet but e appalling natural and human litterbin ey were making of the earth, they might turn more modest men, seeing themselves be truly small, not great. The vantage Int of the moon might at least give them me sense of political and moral perspec- e. They might recollect, to begin with, that mechanical engineering which had trans- ited them to the moon, was itself. to use Current jargon, a technological spin-off:
a by-product of war and of planning for war and of fighting war by unconventional means.
They might also recall that other triumphs of mechanical engineering made warfare and are making warfare easier and safer for those who wage it and far nastier and more dangerous for those who suffer it. They might then reflect that not only were machines being designed to make 5ghting easier for soldiers, but that theories and creeds were continuing to make warfare light on consciences. Soldiers thus find themselves equipped with weapons of vast power with- out at the same time being equipped with any powerful scruples as to their use. Virtu- ally every creed asserts that what a man does in defence of or in support of that creed is good and right and justifiable; and the apologists of nations as well as of creeds say likewise.
But tempting as it might be to dream of shipping our political and moral leaders and mentors up to the moon—and tempting also to dream of leaving them there for good— the temptation is dangerous. For if we fall victim to such temptation, we abandon the hope that ordinary, day-in day-out vigilance at home may, in the nick of time, discourage men from atrocities It is not really that we do not know what we are doing or that we do not know that what we are doing is wrong. We know it academically, as it were: we know it. that is, in a way that does not affect our actions or our reactions. Over ten years ago a member of the present British Cabinet—a Cabinet which supports the American war in Vietnam, and the Nigerian government over Biafra—wrote:
• British and American fighting men 3 . z insist that they shall not be ordered to risk death in close combat if remote con- trol methods of destroying the enemy are available. That is why, during and after World War H, our generals and politicians have felt morally justified in ordering the systematic annihilation of tens of thousands of enemy men, women and children by strategic bombing. From this point of view, the atom bombs employed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the first weapons of their kind but the apex of a development of which the RAF raids on Hamburg and Dresden and the American fire raid which killed 100,000 Japanese in Tokyo were earlier stages. World War 11 taught the leaders of public opinion in Britain as well as America to denounce as squeamish sentimentalists those who questioned either the morality or the expediency of employing these tech- niques of mass annihilation by remote con- trol . .1'
This was R. H. S. Crossman. now exercising his conscience on all our behalfs about private health insurance schemes. He knew once, he probably knows still, the demoralisation of international behaviour which began when soldiers concentrated on killing civilians, and were and are, honoured for so doing. He knows, but he does not know in the sense that his knowledge impels him to act because of that knowledge.
There is nothing new about soldiers killing civilians. But until the Anglo- American air raids of the last war, we had generally held such activity to be dis- reputable and often dishonourable. Then we glorified it, honoured our men who bombed cities, praised their leaders. It has become easier and easier to attack civilians with each development of machinery. The only hope is that enough men, in time enough, will refuse to obey superior orders based upon the orthodoxies of anti-communism, communism or the nation-state, if those orders are to carry out self-evident atrocities, such as shooting down women and children in Vietnam. or bombing women and children in Germany or Japan, or gassing Jews, or terrorising Arabs. We can no longer afford the luxurious and self-indulgent vice of patriotism. We know this. But we do not act upon our knowledge. We are still spell- bound by our terrible orthodoxies.
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