E55: It is a sweet and honorable thing to die for one's country. The poet Wilfred Owen described this saying as 'the old lie'. Do you agree?

This is a very old saying. Whether it is the old lie is arguable. In his odes, the Roman poet Horace wrote this no less than three times: 'dulce et decorum est pro patria mori'. He lived from 65 to 8 B.C., was also a soldier, fought at Philippi, afterwards lost his estate, and was reduced to poverty. He remained a patriot. The poet Wilfred Owen, a resident of France, returned to England to enlist in the First World War at the age of 22, fought in the trenches, and was killed at age 25, a week before the Armistice in 1918.
The most prominent war poet, Owen's verse expresses his hatred of war. How much of his virulence was due to the emotional instability caused by his homosexuality is a moot point. The fact remains that he fought. Why?

The intervening two thousand years have polarized the divide between the patriot and the pacifist. Any book of quotations offers scores of examples of quotations supporting both sides; Samuel Johnson described patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel ; Thomas Campbell wrote 'The patriot's blood's the seed of Freedom's tree'.

For various reasons, the modern pacifist's case is perhaps stronger than of his predecessors. Firstly, because the 20th century, in two major wars, made civilian enlistment compulsory on the part of the countries involved. In the UK in the First World War, extreme moral pressure was brought to bear. Any man not seen in uniform was in danger of being given a white feather by the women - for cowardice. The actual reasons for opting out varied; it could be cowardice, it could be a different form of national service, it could be a lifelong and previously stated total rejection of violence in any circumstances. In the latter case, such views were generally respected, providing some other contribution to the war effort was made. The Society of Friends (the 'Quakers') provides a good example in the Second World War. These men and women were prepared to risk their lives, and many lost their lives, in some form of national service; medical work, ambulance driving, merchant shipping crews, etc. One Christian school of thought rejects any kind of participation in war, arguing that aggressors should not be resisted, that tyranny, carrying as it does the seeds of its own eventual downfall, should be accepted. Their case has been greatly strengthened by the fundamental difference between earlier wars and those of this century. In the two wars 1914 - 18 and 1939 - 45, civilian populations were involved, like it or not, because of bombing raids, and ultimately the use of the atom bomb against Japan. Nothing, they argue, can justify what happened to London, Coventry, Dresden, Wuppertal, Cologne, Berlin, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nothing justifies mass slaughter. The future use of the hydrogen bomb would be even more horrific.

And now the case for patriotism. Like it or not, the citizens of all civilized countries owe an incalculable debt to their homelands; protection from foreign aggression, from internal crime, from disease, from penury. They receive education, a minimum standard of living, an old-age pension; complete personal freedom, in keeping with law, freedom of religious worship, freedom of movement, every opportunity for self-advancement, at least in the democracies. In such countries, everybody is born under an obligation to the state, and if that obligation is rejected, so also should be the benefits mentioned. Perhaps even more fundamental is a built-in affection for the distinctive characteristics of one's own country, its history, traditions, folk-ethic, literature, music, human relationships. An aggressor such as Hitler would wipe out all these things, as he almost wiped out the Jewish population of Europe. He would replace freedom with tyranny, he would consign dissidents to concentration camps. So not only is force of arms justified in a defensive role, it is also justified in some categories of offence; e.g. intervention in foreign countries where populations are threatened with genocide, as currently in Yugoslavia and Ethiopia. This type of intervention is rightly carried out by professional armed service members at the instigation of the United Nations.

What cannot be justified on patriotic grounds is expansionist aggression as is favored by certain leaders or, as in the past, by the empire-building countries of Europe, whether or not their rule imparted freedom, stability, enlightenment and prosperity.

None of us can accept what our own country has given us and still remain, morally, totally free agents. So given the provisos mentioned, and with every respect to the best kind of pacifist, I believe that the true patriot wins the argument.