IV-IV, re: Sixties futility/: The heretic perspective of Uwe Johnson

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Uwe Johnson: Concerning an attitude of protesting


Some good people do not tire of declaring in public that they abominate their
country's participation in the war in Vietnam; what can they have in mind?
The good people claim for themselves the observation that war is no longer
permitted between civilized nation-states; the good people stood pat when the
colonial police of civilized nation-states disturbed those people merely with
police, before they could become an independent nation. The good people are heard
complaining that the world's greatest country uses advanced weapon systems against
a small country, partly experimentally, and especially the trying out of more
effective means of annihilation irritates the good people; the good people sat
quietly in the corner while the armies gained capacity, they granted the army the
very diet of manoeuvres, now they scream over the machine's natural greed for fodder
truer to life. The good people dwell on morals, observance of the Geneva Agreements
is what they wish, negotiations, fair elections, withdrawal of foreign troops, decency,
they say, and the Dignity of Man; they talk to the superhuman egoism of a State as to
a private person with private virtues. What the good people do not like about the war
is that it is visible; the good people eat of the fruits their governments harvest for
them in Asian politics and on Asian markets. The good people want a good capitalism,
an abstention from expansion by war; the good people want a singing horse --- what
they do not want is communism. The good people want a good world; they do nothing about
it. The good people do not try to stop the workers from earning their living by
production of armaments; they do not hold up the concripted who risk their lives in
this war, the good people stand in the marketplace and point themselves out as
the better ones. These good people will soon, with embarassment, describe their protest
against this war as their juvenile period, as the good people before them now talk about
Hiroshima and democracy and Cuba. The good people should kindly shut up. Let them be good
to their kids, even to kids who are not their own, to their cats, even to strange ones.
If only they would stop talking about a species of goodness they help to make impossible.

[first published in Cecil Wolf/John Bagguley: Authors Take Sides on Vietnam.
London 1967]


kfl