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

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwe_Johnson


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> Uwe Johnson: Concerning an attitude of protesting
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> 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]
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> kfl