Today, on Veterans Day, I am happy to introduce my friend and US Army veteran: Michael P. Corey. Michael is a New School PhD with a special interest in the Vietnam War and collective memory.
The terms “means” and “ends” bring to mind relations among self-centered nations competing with one another. “A mean to an end.” “The end is worth its means.”
It is one way of looking at the international political situation. This world looks very different from the top looking down and from the bottom looking up. For many policy makers, it involves judgments made in the name of national interests and security; and in more recent years additional concerns have been about international interests and security. From the bottom looking up, especially among combat veterans, the major concern is simply survival.
In 1927, Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political wrote, “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy … The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.” About 100 years prior to Schmitt, Carl von Clausewitz observed, “War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with a mixture of other means.” These, the view from the top down.
A perspective from the bottom looking up is a passage by William Broyles, Jr. in his often quoted 1984 essay, “Why Men Love War,” “War is ugly, horrible, evil, and it is reasonable for men to hate all that. But I believe that most men who have been to war would have to admit, if they are honest, that somewhere inside themselves they loved it too, loved it as much as anything that has happened to them before or since.”
These perspectives pose challenges for veterans of all sorts and for those who have either antiwar or pacifist beliefs. War is a tool of politics, and it has consequences. Alternatively, the unwillingness to use war as a tool also has consequences.
Veterans Day sparked some remembrances . . .