HAROLD BRODKEY
597
client dictators have not, on the whole, committed aggression which,
historically, means they have not been trespassers against peace.
As you all know, such American peace is a divisive issue among
Americans. This issue divides the country as perhaps no other issue
does at the moment. For one thing, we do not offer any systematic
program of public morality that proposes so clearly the welfare of
people to the hopeful extent that Marxism and its variations do.
Another way of saying this is that we cannot, at this stage of
our history, live, as Americans, without being partisans of many of
the intentions of Marxism and some of its social analyses - we do not
see hope in lesser programs .
But the intentions of Marxism forbid a Marxist state of the sorts
we have seen so far, just as, in another but related sense, the inten–
tions of the Talmudic Judaism forbid a territorial Jewish state of the
real sort that has come into existence in real moments ; and so sad–
ness comes because of the relation of ideal to real time.
I am not condemning Israel or lauding it. I am arguing about
the relation of idea and morality to territorial states .
The complexities of American reality - and conscience - have
shown us again and again in the last forty years that we do not have
a military tradition or the political or economic or moral and
social
structures that can support and carry off policing actions, while the
life of this most peculiar nation of ours continues as if we had any life
at all here when we are not at peace. We fall apart politically with
our own corruptions and our complex nature as a government and
as a perpetual social experiment, when the nation tries to continue to
exist politically on top of the shaky underpinning of heroic deaths in
what is proposed as a limited military action. We can fall apart polit–
ically with corruption and the rest of it and manage to hold together
in major wars but not in the others; and it is historically clear that we
do not recover from our wars. Vietnam destroyed the liberal demo–
cratic movement in our country. We have no culture to survive the
uproars and breakages of large-scale historical events. We are a po–
litical culture, and perhaps we are only a political culture. So our
policing efforts turn under the force of politics and of an inadequate
army and a not very inspired officer corps into genuine wars although
not worldwide ones; and they require more national attention, and
they bring on more dislocation and more complete national mobiliza–
tion than England carried out during the Napoleonic Wars.
And our small wars have not proved to be genocidal, but they
