[lit-ideas] Defeatism?

On page 203, Podhoretz writes, "We who believe in the absolute necessity of
fighting and winning World War IV can complain all we like about the
conditions that have bred so much defeatism, and from which our morale will
continue to suffer to an extent undreamed of in World War II, and even more
than it did in World War III.  But these are the conditions under which
World War IV will have to be fought if it is to be fought at all.  And if it
is to be fought at all, it will also have to be fought by the kind of people
Americans now are.  Before the United States entered World war II, serious
doubts were raised as to whether we were a match for such disciplined and
fanatical enemies as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  And in World War III,
leading anti-Communists like Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham were sure
that we lacked the stomach, the heart, the will, and the wit to stand
effectively against the true believers of the Soviet Union and its allies
and sympathizers: to Chambers we were 'the losing side,' and to Burnham we
were veritably suicidal in our liberal weakness and folly.  They turned out
to be wrong because - as, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Charles
Horner of the Hudson Institute would put it in speaking of Chambers - they,
and not they alone, failed 'to anticipate the resiliency of the American
citizenry and its leadership.'  Today, as I write, similar doubts and fears
are once again flying all over the place, with even some who would like to
believe otherwise murmuring that we have all grown too soft, too
self-indulgent, and too self-absorbed to meet an even more daunting
challenge from an enemy who is so much readier to die for his beliefs than
most of us are.  It is also being said that we have grown so complacent
since 9/11/2001 that nothing short of another terrorist attack here at home
will shake us back into the realization that we are actually at war.

 

"It would be foolish to deny that there is some basis for such doubts and
fears.  And yet it would surely be just as foolish to repeat the mistake of
Chambers and Burnham in failing 'to anticipate the resiliency of the
American citizenry and its leadership.'  As to the citizenry, we need only
point to the young Americans in uniform, all volunteers, who have been
bearing the heaviest burden of World War IV.  In their determination, their
courage, and their love of country, they are by all accounts a match, and
more than a match, for their forebears of World War II and World War III.
And who is to say that these young people are less representative of America
than those of their elders and contemporaries who conspicuously lack the
same virtues?"

 

Lawrence

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