“Resolve”—to what end?

Last July after the London bombings, Ben Macintyre writing in the Times of London asked, what would Churchill have done about the terrorist threat? This is a good question, considering all the people who issue statements about “Churchillian resolve” but decline to tell us, resolve for what? For example, after columnist James Pinkerton last summer spoke about the need for “resolve,” I asked him, twice, “What is the object of this resolve, to what end is this ‘resolve’ to be directed?”, and he decined to answer, though in the past he had always replied promptly to my e-mails.

Macintyre’s answer is that Churchill would have answered as he did in his book on the Sudan campaign:

For in the end, Churchill saw the Sudan campaign as a conflict between barbarity and civilisation. Of the battle of Omdurman he wrote: “Civilisation—elsewhere sympathetic, merciful, tolerant, ready to discuss or argue, eager to avoid violence, to submit to law, to effect compromise—here advanced with an expression of inexorable sternness.”

That, undoubtedly, would have been Churchill’s response to the suicide bombings in London: these are not disasters to be “tamely survived” but an immoral assault on civilised values, to be fought with “inexorable sternness.”

Now that does not sound to me like the Bush/Blair/Pinkerton language, which boasts about “resolve” but which turns out more often than not to be the resolve not to give up our belief in unlimited tolerance. True, it is not unlimited tolerance for those who seek to kill us. Rather it is unlimited tolerance for those who have the same beliefs as those who seek to kill us, who have the same goals as those who seek to kill us, and who in fact support those who seek to kill us. Macintyre is talking about inexorable sternness, which can only mean sternness towards our actual enemies, which means, not just those in the front lines, but the entire enemy army.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 30, 2005 10:59 AM | Send