I am reading Kirk’s book on TS Eliot (Eliot and His Age) for a upcoming seminar in Indianapolis, and this fragment caught my eye. In 1936, Eliot wrote that “[t]he believer in just war is in danger of inferring, at the moment when war is seen to be inevitable, that the war is necessarily just.” Eliot is pointing out the temptation to confuse an assessment of facts (war is coming) with belief (the war is just). Of course, that is exactly the temptation for some movement conservatives, for whom the inevitability of the war on “terror” is part of its justness.
