The Pacifist Warmongers

By the spring of this year, they openly linked nuclear power with the demand for unilateral disarmament. They now stage protests at Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapons plant to demand the banning of all nuclear power plants. Their message is loud, clear and nasty: We do not wish to decimate America merely by depriving it of its energy, but also by dismantling its defenses.

They cover up the alternative in defense just as they do in power. They evade the question of why more people should be killed, maimed and diseased by less safe power sources when the safer form of nuclear power is available; and they evade the question of whether they consider living on their knees in a Soviet Empire preferable to standing up to the most powerful tyranny that mankind has ever faced.

They evade both questions because their answers are not pretty. They do not care two hoots about health, safety or environment; nuclear power just makes a convenient target for their political ambitions. They evade the question of how to defend America because they do not want to defend it at all.

The older ones among us have seen these ulcers of a diseased society before. Forty years ago, Daladier told the French that they were safe behind the Maginot line; Chamberlain told the British that he had brought them Peace in Our Time; the German American Bund told Americans that Hitler was a kindly man who wanted no more than a square deal for Germany.

And people loved to listen to them. Nobody loves the truth when it is ugly; Churchill was branded a warmonger and crank, and his voice in the wilderness went unheeded.

The German American Bund is gone, and all that red mains are the graves of those who died fighting what it had stood for.

These graves are now being trampled on by Daniel Ellsberg, who supports war only when his side is winning, and Helen Caldicott, who begins her vicious harangues by recalling "I was only six years old when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped," and forgetting that as an Australian, she might not have grown much older if the war against Japanese fascism had not been fought with the most powerful and rapid means at the allies' disposal.

The pacifists of the 1930's, with their cheap and ever popular opposition to defense, helped to weaken their countries and to encourage aggression; the smug students at Cambridge University who in 1935 passed a resolution that "This House will not fight for King and Country" did their little bit to invite war.

Today Ellsberg and Caldicott strut about with cheap talk about how they abhor war (everybody else loves it). They are reaching a young audience of their own kind: the pampered brats from affluent homes who have never known the real horrors of war. Just as they are willing to threaten their fellow citizens' health by denying them a safer power source, so are they willing to threaten their security by dismantling their country's defenses. It matters little whether they are vicious or incompetent; the end result is that the alleged safety advocates are effectively promoting death and disease, and the alleged pacifists are effectively inviting war by the aggressors.

It is time decent citizens stood up to the Ellsbergs and Caldicotts whose sanctimonious hypocrisy is denying them an abundant and safe power source; but it is also time to stand up to them in the field into which they have now rudely tresspassed, and to expose their indecency as they defile the graves of those who died so that Ellsberg and Caldicott could live in freedom.