FROM:· Peace Trek Family Coloring Book-see page 14 (Illustration by Diane Schatz) ·by Wendell Berry The present situation with regard to "national defense," as I believe that we citizens are now bidden to understand it, is that we, our country; and our governing principles of religion and politics Cl{e so threatened by a foreign enemy that we must prepare for a sacrifice that makes child's play of the "supreme sacrifices" of previous conflicts. We are asked, that is, not simply to "die in defense of our country," but to accept and condone the deaths of virtually the whole population of our country, of our political and religious principles, and of our land itself, as a reasonable cost of national defense. The absurdity of the argument lies in a little-noted law of the nature of technology: that, past a certain power and scale, we do not dictate our terms to the tools we use; rather, the tools dictate their terms to us. Past a certain power and scale, we may choose the means',' but not' the ends. We may choose nuclear weaponry as a form of defense, but that is the' last of our "free choices" with regard to nuclear weaponry. By that choice we largely abandon .ourselves to terms and results.dictated by the nature of nuelear weapons. Our nuclear weaons articulate a.perfect hatred; such as none of.us has ever felt, or can feel, or can imagine feeling. In · order to make a nuclear attac~· against the Russians we must hate them all enough to kill them all: the innocent as well as the guilty, the·children as·well as the grownups. Thus, though it may be humanly impossible for us to propose it, we allow our technology to propose for us the defense of Summer 1986 RAIN page 5 More Weapons or More Community? Toward a Stronger, Safer America Christian love and justice (as we invariably put it) by an act of perfect hatred and perfect injustice. .Or, as a prominent · "conservative" columnist once put it, in order to save civilization we must become uncivilized. · But the absurdity does not stop with the death of all our enemies and all of our principles. It does not stop anywhere. Our nuclear weapons articulate for us a hatred of the Russian country itself: the land, water, air, light, plants, and animals of Russia. Those weapons will enact for us a perfect political hatred of birds and fish and trees. And they will enact for us too a perfect h~tred of ourselves, for a part of the inescapable meaning of those weapons is that we must hate -our enemies so perfectly that in order to destroy themwe are willing to destroy ourselves. · I understand hatred and enmity very well from my own experience. Defense, moreover, is congenial to me, and I am willingly,.and sometimes joyfully, a defender of some things-:--among them, the principles and practices of d~mocracy and Christianity that nuclear weapons are said to defend. f do not want to live under a government like that of Soviet Russia and I would go to considerable trouble to avoid doing so. I am not dissenting from the standing policy on national defense because I want the nation-that is, the country, its lives, and principles-to be undefended. I am dissenting because I no longer believe that the standing policy on national defense can defend the nation. And I am dissenting ·
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