A curious apology

Nigel Biggar (theologian), In Defence of War:

Why write yet another book on the justification of war? Why not a book on the arts of peacemaking instead? Surely peace, not war, should have first claim on our attention and reflection and creative intelligence.

I cannot deny the truth of this statement, nor the force of the questions preceding it. I cannot deny them, since I know that war is horrendous and that working to prevent its outbreak – even if in the end that should prove justified – is our first and most urgent duty. A fortiori as a Christian I cannot deny these things.

Nevertheless, I confess that I do not have it in me to write a book about peace. Maybe in due course I shall have; but I do not have it now. Now, as for most of my life, it is war that captures my imagination. I read nothing so voraciously as military history. Wherever I go, if there is a battlefield or a war cemetary, I will make a point of visiting it: Waterloo, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Gallipoli, Ypres, the Somme, Jerusalem, Gibraltar, Maleme and Souda Bay in Crete, Leningrad, Malta, El Alamein, Assisi, Rome, Normandy.

Whence the fascination? I grew up in a country haunted by the two world wars. As a child I played in my grandmother’s air-raid shelter, and I heard about the German bomber that had crash-landed in the adjacent field only twenty years before. I attended a school and a university college where the names of the war dead cascade down whole walls. A brother of my father’s father left Scotland for France one September day in 1915 and was killed three weeks later at the battle of Loos. He was twenty-one years old. My mother’s youngest brother flew out over the Burmese jungle on another September day in 1944 and never was heard of again. He was twenty-two years old. My father himself volunteered in 1943, aged thirty, and spent the next two-and-a-half years in Italy first manning an anti-aircraft gun and then, when there were no more enemy planes left to shoot at, carrying a stretcher. …

War therefore exercises my imagination in a way that peace does not. I do not claim this as a virtue. I merely state it as a fact from which I cannot escape, but which therefore defines (for now) my vocation. The arts of peacemaking certainly deserve attention, and others who are differently located and called should reflect on them. In the meantime, however, it is my task to think and write out of the place – historical, cultural, emotional, imaginative – that has, with all its many limitations, been given me. I have inherited a certain fate, and I must honour it.

So here is another book on the moral justification of war. …

There are obvious rejoinders, but the apology rings true at least in this respect: many people really do believe in the link between heritage and justification. Some people refrain from condemning the Confederate cause or the Zionist cause (or whatever) just because of the heritage that has fashioned their mental furniture – and that claims them as heirs – is Southern or Jewish (or whatever). Until the link between heritage and justification is undone, anti-war argumentation is beside the point.