On June 17, my wife and I visited Bunker Hill exactly 250 years after its storming by British troops. We read the names of the Americans who died for what they called liberty—an abstraction, perhaps, but it’s what allows me to write these lines with no fear of retribution. It’s a rare and precious gift. At Bunker Hill, we learned of Phillis Wheatley, an African American poet born into slavery who lived in Boston in the 1770s. She wrote, “In every breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression.”
This brings me to Paul Griffiths’s response (“The Hideous Deaths Obscured by Ideology,” June) to my recent article about the war in Ukraine. Together with the results of our last election, Griffiths’s call for the U.S. government to abandon aid for Ukraine’s self-defense makes me wonder whether we have lost touch with the virtues of freedom and democracy. As citizens, we have a duty to protect these virtues when they are threatened. Yet many of us live very well (just look at the cars we drive), and perhaps we’ve succumbed to the spiritual complacency that the Founders feared was inevitable in a republic. Ukraine shows what is at stake when freedom succumbs to its enemies. In the areas they have seized, Russian authorities have rapidly turned oppression from abstraction to lived nightmare, snatching people they suspect of defiance off the street in order to intimidate everyone.
The goal of Griffiths’s pacifism is an end to the killing—peace—but I wonder if closing one’s eyes to the victims of such aggression will achieve even that. Sustained injustice produces not peace but violent explosions of dissent, like our own revolution, or the German Peasants’ War, whose anniversary we commemorate this year. Griffiths is right to warn of the dangers of ideology—but I would add that what’s really dangerous is unquestioned ideology. After all, in a descriptive sense, ideology simply means a “systematic body of concepts, beliefs, and values held by a particular group or culture” (Merriam-Webster’s definition).
Many Russians, led astray by Putin’s imperialism, unquestioningly believe they are fighting for the right thing; other Russians, availing themselves of readily accessible news media, know that the war is wrong. Perhaps today’s Russia, like imperial Germany of yore, needs to learn the hard way; a lost war can be an indelible lesson.
But war is not necessary. In 1914 and 1939, Germans had neglected the basic demand of becoming fully aware citizens, and passively or actively succumbed to their own regime’s imperialism. They could have known that Russia or France were not mortal enemies, or that the goal of limitless expansion was a dangerous illusion. See the wartime diaries of Theodor Haecker, a fierce Catholic critic of German imperialism. He occasionally revealed his own keen dissent from the official version of reality in small gatherings—for example, in Munich in February 1943. The students he inspired printed leaflets and scribbled “Down with Hitler” and “Freedom” on public places: like many of the Americans at Bunker Hill, the students who were caught paid with their lives. Freedom, which contributors to Commonweal may be tempted to take for granted or denigrate as an abstraction, is possible only because others have been willing to die for it. Ironically, even Griffiths’s pacificism could not exist without well-armed, well-trained soldiers pledged to defend it.
One way or another, Russians must learn that Ukraine is not territory to which they have historic rights, that NATO does not threaten their country, and that they are ruled by an irresponsible clique. From the summer of 1943 to May 1945, my father served as a combat medic in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. Among his personal effects is a battalion communiqué from May 10, 1945, with the names of seventy comrades killed in action. The surviving men pledged their lives “that we will forever fight as you did against any ambition that disregards wrong so long as it succeeds in its aims.” These survivors had “seen the lust for an empire completely annihilated.” So had most Germans.
Despite the pleadings of his four sons, my father never uttered a word about what he had seen and experienced. The horrors of the battlefield could not be translated into any idiom we might understand. He could talk about those two years of his life only to others who had “been there.” My father hated war—he even hated war movies—but never regretted his service. There are no good wars, but some wars are just.
