It is, of course, true that wars never do half the good which the leaders of the belligerents say they are going to do. Nothing ever does half the good — perhaps nothing ever does half the evil — which is expected of it. And that may be a sound argument for not pitching one’s propaganda too high. But it is no argument against war. If a Germanised Europe in 1914 would have been an evil, then the war which would have prevented that evil would have been, so far, justified. To call it useless because it did not also cure slums and unemployment is like coming up to a man who has just succeeded in defending himself from a man-eating tiger and saying, “It’s no good, old chap. This hasn’t really cured your rheumatism!”
CS Lewis
Pacifism is a pet peeve of mine, so this is one of my all-time favorite of Prof. Lewis’s essays. Thanks for sharing!
The human person is irreplaceable and self-determining. If Gandhi wanted to be a pacifist, Gandhi was free to be a pacifist. Removing man’s innate human right to self-preservation en-mass is not democracy but communism. The Second Amendment is our Founding Fathers’ opinion on pacifism.