Northrop Frye – Pro Patria Mori
The number of letters received by the Editor, including a few contributions, congratulatory and condemnatory, on the result of Victoria’s discussion of the Oxford Debate on their relation to Kind and Country have made it obvious that the University and its alumni look to Acta for a formulation of the undergraduate attitude. At the request of the Associate Editor, in whose hands this issue is, I shall as a contributor endeavour to bring out the leading indications of the resolution: “That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country”…
What the motion signified, as I conceive it, was that there is a substantial group at Victoria who are ready to push a desire for peace to its logical and inevitable conclusion of refusing to break peace, and who believe that anything short of direct action in this regard is hypocrisy or moral cowardice. That a concrete statement should meet with such a roar of outraged protest, both here and in England, when the mouthing of pious abstractions in generalized terms meaning…the same thing, would have been greeted by unctuous approval, strike this group as absurd and vicious. (This group) gets down to brass tacks with its real opponents, who admit that war is an unmitigated and purposeless horror, but that as long as the status quo in economics, which implies a periodicity in annihilation wars, is kept alive by Fascist or other forms of dictatorship, there is always danger, and a war of defence probable for more peaceably-minded nations.
Now on strictly defensive grounds the pacifist argument begins to lack conviction… There is, of course, no such thing as an enemy. Even in the frenzy of 1914 people were only able to persuade themselves that they really ought to be fighting Germans by inventing an imaginary abstraction of savagery called a “Hun” and saying that this was a typical German. But while there are no enemies, any man or group of men who is in our country with hostile intent is a criminal, and has to be treated as such. That is, he must be shot down in cold blood. That this shooting down of a human life is a hideous insensate butchery is quite true, and that fact must be faced with set teeth, both in wartime and in peace. The soldier of another country in our own domain must be as calmly and cynically killed as a noxious insect. That attitude of detached calmness and total lack of either sadism or of patriotic zeal which has been retained by all the invincible military conquerors—Cromwell, Marlborough, Wellington, Napoleon—if adopted by a general populace, would be similarly invincible. As no man of really high intelligence ever goes in for a military career, and as every army is well-known to be a masterpiece of inefficiency, a military attack, whether Japanese, French, German or Russian, could not stand up two weeks against a handful of people who were unhurried and unafraid and could keep their heads. The fact that England has always taken her wars so much more casually than France or Germany, due to her insular position, has been the reason for her easy supremacy.
But what has the phrase “For Kind and Country” got to do with such an attitude? A defensive war is fought for the safety of society, and follows the maxim “Greater love hat no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” King and Country, however, represents a propogandic and deliberately induced hysteria which leads people, mad with the last desperation of fear, to calm themselves suddenly and then hurl themselves in front of a Juggernaut…in obedience to the high priests of the army and the state. Bright uniforms, a thumping rhythmic music, impassioned speeches from hundreds of recruiting sergeants, including the heads of educational and governmental institutions, blazing posters, a frothing press, all scream the ideal of “King and Country.” To say that this is not an appeal to intelligence would be putting it mildly. No state would dare to attempt conscription on the perfectly reasonable excuse that the interests of the nation demanded a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf or some trade concessions in the West Indies. Still less would it appeal to the decency and humanity of individuals, as the maxim above quoted does…
War appeals to young men, because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism. That is why the reaction of the press to the attitude of students has been concentrated on emphasizing their youth and immaturity. We will leave psychologists to examine just how much hatred and envy of youth is concentrated in that reaction. We merely point to the fact that the confidence they express in our responding to another war springs, not from an attitude of despairing horror, as it ought, but from one signified by a wide and toothsome grin. Our task just now is to show that “King and Country” represents the screaming of the professional patriot who is a criminal in peace time, and more of a nuisance than a Hindenburg Line in war, as any Englishman who had anything to do with the late war can tell you. No (one) objects to dying for his friends, or even for a great cause, as a martyr or witness. But to assume that the call to arms of “Your Kind and Country need you” is imperative upon the highest ideals of humanity is an insult to the King and a sneer at the Country.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The propaganda of the war was ample evidence that if the Horatian line as it stands is true, it would be equally true without the pro patria. The abridged form, perhaps, contains all the wisdom of the ages. But no Christian can believe that, and very few non-Christians are ready in cold blood to act upon its logical reference.
57:15 pg.31-2 (1933)