In a rare fit of public service—no, I haven’t been convicted of anything—I need to bring some self-awareness to the automobile drivers of America.  We all enjoy funny bumper stickers; you can laugh with them, or at them, so no matter your ideology, you get a chuckle.  Think of your own reactions to other people’s bumper stickers.  Preachy bumper stickers—ones that convey your sense of moral and intellectual superiority—tend to back-fire.  That is, you don’t end up convincing anyone, and no one’s laughing with you (though some of us will be laughing at you).

Case in point: a bumper sticker I saw recently in traffic.  It proclaimed that “You cannot simultaneously prepare for and prevent war.”  Now, to those of us who actually know something about the topic, it just makes you look stupid (much like this blog’s effect on me).  Because although this did not come from the lips of the President, it is still a progressive statement to which the most appropriate response is that progressive slogan, Yes We Can!

In those immortal words, let me explain.  In order to prevent others from attacking, one must convince them that attacking you will be more costly than beneficial.  The only ways to do this are to make yourself so wretched that the benefit is too minimal to justify any expenditure of effort—and for many years, one might have thought North Korea was pursuing this strategy—or to make the effort required to conquer you too great for any benefit to be enough.

Of course, since the greater the wretchedness of your condition, the less the effort required to beat you, the first is a difficult race to win.  Beyond that, it requires a degree of self-destructive zeal that healthy humans don’t have.  The second alternative, though, has been a constant in human history.  And the means to accomplishing it, to raising the cost of an attack, are precisely to prepare for war, whether with defensive armament (fortifications) or offensive (nuclear explosives).

In fact, the long (if nervous) peace in the last century resulted from this logic.  Mutual Assured Destruction meant that, because each side knew the other could make the consequences of an attack unbearable for the attacker, no one had any desire to attack.  Note that this required each to maintain a preparation for war.  Even in a single-power context, such as the Pax Romana, it was the overwhelming military might of Rome that preserved peace in the empire.  No one dared to poke the bear.

Nor does this come as news, to any who care to pay attention to more than the moral superiority their outrage allows them to imagine.  I may have mentioned this before, because it’s one of my favorite snarks about hippies (original and recycled).  This bumper sticker comes from the idea that it takes two to make war; if one side refuses to fight, there will be no war.  This simply isn’t so; it may be short (see France, World War II), but war there will be.  Imagine there’s a war, and no one goes, as Bertolt Brecht asks.  Brecht—hardly a part of the capitalist war machine—did not blanche from answering his request: then the war comes to you.

Another slogan with selective amnesia syndrome.