Thoughts after reading Bill Whittle's latest essay:

I was moved when I read this. Then I read the comments, and I was moved to anger by some of them, the sneering, superior ones. I started a smoldering retort but never posted it. The pseudointellectual elite love it when they make you mad.

It occurred to me later what offended me so much about these responses. I had been reading it it yesterday in C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man in the first chapter, Men Without Chests.
It's about the malpractice of teaching, but it hits on what astounds me about the anti-war position.

"There are two men to whom we offer in vain a false leading article on patriotism and honour: one is a coward, the other is the honourable and patriotic man," writes Lewis. He is talking about the difference between good and bad literature. By trying to show what bad and bathetic writing is, educators have given the impression that all emotions are not to be trusted.

This is the money quote from Samuel Johnson: 'That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona." One might add "surveying the scene of a Civil War battlefield."

Those who don't understand the feelings of reverence for men like Chamberlain, and can only respond with the hackneyed slogans and distortions of anti-war demonstrators, are men without chests.

They can say they despise Saddam Hussein and feel sympathy for the Iraqi people, but their position on this issue would leave him in power to continue to murder them and steal their patrimony, and reward the perfidy of the Russians and French for violating U.N. sanctions. They don't really feel anything they are claiming, only resentment for those who are proud of our troops and our country for trying to deliver an oppressed people from a 30 years nightmare.