Wars and revolutions have thus far determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century. And as, distinguished from the nineteenth century ideologies - such as nationalism and internationalism, capitalism and imperialism, socialism and communism, which though still invoked by many as justifying causes have lost contact with the major realities of our world-war and revolution still constitutes its two central political issues. They have outlived all their ideological justifications. In a world that poses the threat of total annihilation through revolution, no cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
This in itself is surprising enough. Under the concerted assault of the modern debunking sciences, psychology and sociology, nothing indeed has seemed to be more safely buried than the concept of freedom. Even the revolutionists would much rather degrade freedom to the rank of lower-middle class prejudice than admit that the aim of revolution was, and always has been, freedom. Yet if it was amazing to see how the very word freedom could disappear from the revolutionary vocabulary, it has perhaps been no less astounding to watch how in recent years the idea has intruded itself into the centre of the gravest of all present political debates, the discussion of war and of a justifiable use of violence. Historically wars are among the oldest phenomena of the recorded past while revolutions properly speaking did not exist prior to the modern age; they are among the most recent of all major political data. In contrast to revolution the aim of war was only in rare cases bound up with the notion of freedom; and while it is true that warlike uprisings against a foreign invader have frequently been felt to be sacred they have never been recognized either in theory or in practice as the only just wars.
Justifications of wars even on a theoretical level are quite old, although of course not as organized warfare. Among their obvious pre-requisites is the conviction that political relations in their normal courses do not fall under the sway of violence and this conviction we find for the first time in Greek antiquity in so far as the Greek polis, the city state, defined itself explicitly as a way of life that was based exclusively upon persuasion and not upon violence. However since for the Greeks political life by definition did not extend beyond the walls of the polis, the use of violence seemed to them beyond the need for justification in the realm of what we today call foreign affairs or international relations, even though their foreign affairs with the one exception of the Persian wars which saw hell as united, concerned hardly more than relations between Greek cities. Outside the walls of the polis, that is outside the realm of politics in the Greek sense of the word ‘the strong did what they could and the weak suffered what they must.' (Thucydides)
Hence we must turn to Roman antiquity to find the first justifications of war together with the first notion that there are just and unjust wars. Yet the Roman distinctions and justifications were not concerned with freedom and drew no line between aggressive and defensive warfare. The war that is necessary is just, said Livy; and hallowed are the arms where no hope exists but in them. Necessity, since the time of Livy and through the centuries, has meant many things that we today would find quite sufficient to dub a war unjust rather than just. Conquest expansion, defence of vested interests, conservation of power in view of the rise of new and threatening powers or support of a given power equilibrium - all these well-known realities of power politics were not only actually the causes of the outbreak of most wars in history, they were also recognized as necessities, that is, as legitimate motives to invoke a decision by arms. The notion that aggression is crime and that wars can be justified only if they ward off aggression or prevent it, acquired its practical and even theoretical significance only after, the First World War had demonstrated the horrible destructive potential of warfare under conditions of modern technology.
Perhaps it is because of this noticeable absence of the freedom argument from the traditional justifications of war as the last resort of international politics that we have this curiously jarring sentiment whenever we hear it introduced into the debate of the war question today. To sound off with a cheerful 'give me liberty or give me death' sort of argument in the face of the unprecedented and inconceivable potential of destruction in nuclear warfare is not even hollow; it is down-right ridiculous. Indeed it seems so obvious that it is a very different thing to risk one's own life for the life and freedom of one's country and one's posterity from risking the very existence of the human species for the same purpose that it is difficult not to suspect the defenders of the 'better dead than red' or 'better death than slavery' slogans of bad faith. Which of course is not to say that the reverse 'better red than dead' has any more to recommend itself; when an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the discussion of the war question today is conducted in these terms it is easy to detect a mental reservation in both sides. Those who say 'better dead than red' actually think: The losses may not be as some anticipate, our civilization will survive; while those who say 'better red than dead' actually think: Slavery will not be so bad, man will not change his nature, freedom will not vanish from the earth forever. In other words the bad faith of the discussants lies in that both dodge the preposterous alternative they themselves have proposed: they are not serious.
