It turns everything we know and cherish about ourselves, our notions of civility and civilisation, into so much blood-spattered tripe. Certainly there are Hitlers to be defeated. Real dignity is in ending war altogether. We may never get there, but in that ideal lies true humanity. Self-styled realists, the hawks, will scoff at this.
War is too often a necessity, they bluster.
We need such rhetoric, for otherwise the sheer bloody reality of war would keep every sane young man from becoming a soldier. And even with those stirring phrases, other incentives are necessary. The Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer's book War reproduces a painting of dozens of soldiers hanging from a tree. No, I cannot see the dignity in 'terrorising' already frightened young men into 'brutality, boredom and misery'. When their own possible execution is used to whip them into battle, and this is for glory of country, something is horribly skewed.