'tHE COLO WAR AND THE WEST
25
more nobly. I therefore deny that our situation today is absolutely
unique, permitting no comparisons with the past.
It seems to me to be a monstrous doctrine to believe that in any
situation unless we are certain there will be survivors of an action, it
is meaningless to employ the terms "right" or "wrong," "good" or
"bad."
As
well say that when it appears that all hands are lost, .any
bestial conduct is permitted in the rush to the life boats. On this view,
the probable end of life on the planet makes all moral judgment
meaningless.
Not only is this position morally untenable, it is psychologically
false if it implies that those who have resisted great historical evils
at the cost of their lives have done so with the certainty that there
would be survivors either here or in the hereafter. Those who tell
us that the nuclear age has destroyed the vocabulary of political and
moral judgment are actually narrowing our choice in moments of
fateful decision. Since no rational moral judgment is possible, they
are suggesting that surrender is the instinctively justified animal re–
action. Sometimes they actually assert that life under
any
conditions,
survival at
any
moral cost, is better than non-existence. They are not
always consistent, however, because they also tell us, as an argument
against
a nuclear defence, that: "The survivors will envy the dead."
The difficulty with the position of absolute pacifism is that it
makes the pacifist morally responsible for the evils which an intel–
ligent use of force may sometimes prevent. The individual who re–
fuses to use violence against an aggressor when that is the only means
which can prevent the torture and execution of the innocent is either
less than man or more. He has transcended the plane of human
morality. But he is at least consistent. The unilateralist, however, who
is not a pacifist seems to me to be both muddleheaded and immoral
-muddleheaded because were his policy to prevail in all liklihood
it would bring about what he fears; immoral because he is prepared
to sacrifice every decent human value before the rocket brandishing
threats of the Kremlin.
It is even more difficult to understand those who assert, at one
and the same time, that a nuclear defence against Communist nuclear
aggression is impermissable but that if Hitler had developed com–
parable weapons, resistance against
him
would have been justifiable.
They sometimes speak of the war against Hitler as if
it
were the
