Friday - November 11, 2005
Socrates Understood Our War
Socrates drank the hemlock. He didn't really
have to, but he did.
He was accused
by the people of Athens of being subversive and having a bad, unpatriotic
influence on others in the city. They said he was a menace to the safety of the
city and the people of Athens.
He
disagreed with that assessment, of course. He dissented from the prevailing
ideas, as free people should be able to do, but he didn't seriously believe he
constituted a danger to the existence of the
city.
Socrates is a good, if somewhat
extreme, example of how political dissent should be understood. Sadly, few
today understand the importance of being the "loyal opposition." Many of the
anti-war people today, in fact most of them, aren't really against war so much
as they are against Bush.
Socrates lived in a somewhat pure democracy,
there were no constitutional protections of individual rights. They voted that
Socrates' threat was so great that he deserved a death sentence. Socrates could
easily have escaped. He could have found any number of ways to avoid this
sentence. But Socrates believed in democracy, So he accepted his fate, and
drank the hemlock.
I don't think I
could do that, no matter how much I believed in democracy. And I don't
recommend it to others. But it did a lot to keep Socrates listed among the
pre-eminent philosophers of all time, for practicing what he
preaches.
Would that the dissenters to
our current dominant politicians could be one tenth as dedicated to our form of
government.
Instead, truth is
distorted, lies perpetuated, myths created, demogoguery promoted,
anti-Americanism encouraged.
Now we are
at war, yet the party out of power is dominated by rabble rousers that are
intent on focusing on how we got at war, and creating lies about the decision to
go to war. This is bad, and it's a subject that is irrelevent. It doesn't
matter how the war started, though it was honestly and correctly started. All
that matters now is winning the war.
We
are at war where we dominate militarily. Our enemy's only hope of surviving is
to convince us to give up, lose our will, cede the upper hand, and surrender.
I have little patience with the
Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan supporters. We are in a democracy. Our
greatest weakness is our national will. We must have the discipline to maintain
our strength and win this war. The time for debate is over. The people have
voted. Twice. Our course is set, we cannot take a mulligan and pretend we're
not at war.
Dissent is still
important. There is a lot of room to debate how to win the war. There is no
room to debate whether we should have entered the
war.
Socrates understood this. He
willingly acquiesced to an absurd punishment that cost his life solely because
he understood the importance of maintaining the integrity of the democratic
process.
Today's dissenters should
learn from Socrates. If they don't like the war, they should shut up. We're in
it. We need to be united, because unity of the national will to win is the only
requirement we need to win it. And any effort to disrupt the national will to
win the war is nothing less than treason.
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