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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 17, 2006
Oderint dum metuant
My title today was a favourite saying of the Roman emperor, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus, better known to history by his nickname, Caligula. (He ascended quite young; the word means “baby boots”.) In truth, he is not among the Roman emperors most fondly remembered. Even I do not include him in my gallery of heroes. It did not help that (according at least to Philo) he went mad during an illness in 37 A.D. Upon his recovery, he started executing people by the cartload, for crimes not always entirely clear.He was a strict monarchist from the northern wild, had no appreciation for Roman republican traditions -- he quarrelled bitterly with the Senate -- and ruled at Rome on the model of an Oriental despot, with gaudy and somewhat tasteless trappings, and rather unRoman domestic habits, such as sleeping with his sister in the manner of those Ptolemies in Egypt. This did not endear him to the East, however, for there were riots in response to his more casual edicts, in Alexandria, and elsewhere. He wanted to erect a statue to himself in the sanctuary of the Temple at Jerusalem. This did not go over well with the Jews. And Christians, like me, can recall no particular affection for him, from the earliest days of the Church. I did not admire Josef Stalin, either, but I used to quote with approval, during the Cold War, a saying of Stalin’s that I thought rather wise. It was, “Nuclear weapons are only a problem for people with bad nerves.” This expressed the sort of attitude that freed one from panic, when standing up to the Communists. We may translate, “Oderint dum metuant” as, “Let them hate, so long as they fear.” It is the precise opposite of, “Win their hearts and minds.” And it is, once again, an attitude blessedly free of that panic which, I think, all Western policy towards the “Islamist” terror threat is now tending, starting with flight from Iraq. My column Wednesday contained a line intended to be memorable, and which I notice is now being quoted here and there. Regretting the caution and delicacy with which U.S. and allied forces pursued the enemy in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, I wrote that the “strategy” in Fallujah should have been, “to make it into a parking lot, and build a Wal-Mart at one end”. Very well, the Wal-Mart was a flourish. And so, for that matter, was making the parking lot -- unless there’s no choice left. But Iraq is a just and necessary war, and therefore it must be won, in an unsentimental way. Several learned correspondents have since asked if I thought my prescription was fully compatible with e.g. Pope Benedict’s recent remarks to the effect that states had to set ethical limits in what they do to protect their citizens from terrorism. Or more generally, had I forgotten the long rich Catholic tradition of defining not only what is a just war, but what are just ways of fighting. My reply will continue to be, “Hiroshima, my love.” I do not think dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was at all a nice thing. I freely acknowledge that many, many, innocent people were killed, in a horrible way. Many more were killed in the preceding “conventional” incendiary bombing of Tokyo. But I agree with the late President Truman, who saw it was the quickest way to end the war, and thus save the many millions of lives, both allied and enemy, that would be lost in a pointless “conventional” land invasion of island Japan. And it worked: the surrender was quickly forthcoming. What the older “just-war theorists” knew, or learned (starting with St Augustine, if you read his successive prescriptions for dealing with violent schismatics), is that war is ruthless. The very humane Clausewitz taught, that the war leader unprepared to be as ruthless as his enemy does not bring peace. He creates a quagmire, and his hesitations lead finally to defeat. The chemo-therapist does not negotiate with a cancer, nor grant it the benefit of the doubt. He does not weep for all the hairs that will fall out. As to the enemy we presently face -- the same in the Sunni Triangle as over Manhattan in September, 2001 -- we cannot win their hearts and minds in the foreseeable future. They do not love us. Therefore let them hate, so long as we can make them fear us more than we fear them. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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