Peace Kills . . . or How Tom Bombadil is objectively pro-Sauron

In a letter written in April of 1954 J. R. R. Tolkien writes, apropos his character Tom Bombadil:

"The story [The Lord of the Rings] is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. [B]ut if you have, as it were 'taken a vow of poverty,' renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natual pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron."

Twelve years earlier, in the August-September 1942 issue of Partisan Review, George Orwell wrote an essay entitled Pacifism and the War , in which he famously remarked:

"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

I am not interested in pacifism as a ‘moral phenomenon’. If Mr Savage and others imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

And in his magnificent book, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, historian Robert Conquest writes, apropos the Cold War:

"Politically, the West went through a very vulnerable period. Even so, American -- and potentially West European -- power was such that it could not be faced directly. . . So, as was to be the case throughout the Cold War, this Western defensive strength was attacked as being inherently aggressive. The central theme of the Soviet operation against the Western public mind was "peace." Every mobilization of Western power, every Western failure to accept Soviet proposals in negotiation, every speech, book, broadcast, or article by a Westerner conveying the facts about Stalinism, were branded as offenses against peace. Vast 'Peace Campaigns' were launched in the West, with agitation, mass meetings, polemics in the press and on the radio.

Some thoughts about these quotations:

1. Besides reminding me how utterly sick I am of pampered, latte-toting, cell-phone-wielding college kids, resplendent in Che Guevara T-shirts and expensive leather sandals, who live off slops from their parents' bourgeois pig trough and smugly intone "give peace a chance" and "peace is patriotic" as though they were reciting holy writ, those quotations -- particularly Tolkien's and Orwell's -- remind me that pacifism, especially pacifism in wartime, is a luxury born of the very culture from which the pacifist seeks to remain "aloof." Even Tolkien, whose Tom Bombadil is after all a beloved character and whose account of the pacifist view is quite benign, acknowledges that the existence of the pacifist view -- indeed the existence of the pacifist himself -- depends on the outcome of the war in which he refuses to participate. Tom Bombadil probably doesn't deserve the "objectively pro-Sauron" label, but he is, like all pacifists in wartime (even Gandhi), irrelevant to the main action.

2. It's precisely the idea of the luxury of pacifism and protest that Zell Miller tapped into in his remarks at the RNC: "For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest. It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag, who gives that protester the freedom he abuses to burn that flag." Is this a truism? Perhaps, but truisms and cliches only become what they are through the consensus of a common culture, through a shared acknowledgement and acceptance of the principles which underlie them. Once those principles begin to decay, once the culture which previously acknowledged those principles begins to fragment, the former truism gets invested with a new significance. This phenomenon is captured brilliantly in the penultimate scene of the Coen brothers' fim, Fargo, in which Marge the policewoman questions the murderer she has just apprehended. Marge says, "There's more to life than just a little bit of money. Didn't you know that?" What might have been a cliche derives unexpected force from the Coen brothers depiction of a world in which, for most of the characters, the answer to Marge's question is "No, I didn't know that." I would argue that, for a significant section of the Democratic "base," Miller's "truisms" express principles they have long forgotten or chosen to ignore. Miller's righteous anger was directed at the pacifist mentality which, by adhering to a "bourgeois illusion bred of money and security," routinely displays contempt for the military, for shows of force, and even for individual soldiers, even while it complacently extols the "rights" purchased for them by the blood of others.