COLUMN RIGHT : Let’s Produce More Patriots, Not Peaceniks : We educate for self-indulgence and guilt-ridden skepticism, instead of paying for weapons to protect our young.

Nobody should believe that there is a benefit in war that outweighs the tragic cost of it. Nevertheless, peace, too, has its costs, and not the least of them is the fog of self-indulgence, which causes us to forget the truth of our condition and to luxuriate in fantasy. Death is put out of mind, loyalties are eroded and commitments forgotten: All is submerged in a haze of sentimentality. Then suddenly comes war, the fog is swept away and the true human virtues are revealed in all their stark simplicity.

We see at once what is meant by courage, loyalty and justice, and recognize that they have nothing to do with the lukewarm fellow-feeling and guilt-ridden skepticism that are now widely propounded as moral ideals.

It amazes me that our young people can pass through 15 years of state education, during which they are taught that excellence is wicked and distinction elitist, that our past is injustice and our present mere oppression, that patriotism is a dirty word and military power a dirtier one, that no God, government or society is worth dying for--that they can go through all this and then, at the call to action, go quietly to lay down their lives.

It is testimony to the wonderful resilience of the human spirit that it can recover so quickly from the disease of “education.” It is only a pity that such vast amounts of the national income are devoted to spreading the disease, when the money could have been spent on the weapons needed to protect our young from slaughter.

But here, too, is one of the lessons of war. In the illusory security of peacetime, there arises the idea that we can make do with antiquated weaponry, backed up by heartfelt professions of our peaceful ideals. Some people fall so deeply in love with this fantasy as to shape it into a new religion: the religion of “peace,” which regards those who do not subscribe to it as either stupid or evil.

Remember President Reagan’s long fight with the peaceniks--a fight that he conducted with exemplary civility, on behalf of his country and the principles for which it stands? Remember his Strategic Defense Initiative, and the extraordinary efforts that were made to thwart it? “It won’t work,” said one self-appointed expert; “it will upset the balance of power,” said another; “it will destabilize, threaten, escalate”--and so on. Congress was assailed by lobbyists, while East Coast gurus filled the pages of the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, each claiming infallibly to prove (usually by arguments that contradicted some other infallible proof) that the search for weapons that would destroy an enemy’s nuclear arsenal while leaving his population unharmed posed the greatest threat to peace since Genghis Khan. I have even heard a well-meaning peacenik argue, in passionate tones that brooked no contradiction, that SDI could not possibly work, and moreover that it would involve an “unacceptable threat” to Soviet security--the poor Soviet Union being presumably such a tender plant as to feel threatened even by entirely useless weapons.

Students of sophistry and self-deception will experience a certain chill fascination in going back over those arguments, which have been deployed against every weapon (or rather every American weapon), from the hydrogen bomb to the Stealth airplane. But it is time to put the record straight. It may be (though I, for one, seriously doubt it) that the Soviet Union no longer presents a threat to us. But that is of secondary importance, beside the fact that weapons, once invented, will sooner or later end up in the hands of our enemies, whoever they may be.

The West’s greatest asset is Western civilization itself, with its vast accumulation of intellectual capital, its freedom of thought and experiment, its inventiveness and creative power; and it is only by drawing on this asset that we can guarantee our future.

Let us hope that we have learned the lesson. Let us hope that, after the war, Congress will deliberate upon the significance of weapons like the Patriot missile, and perceive the wonderful advantage, both military and moral, of weapons that destroy other weapons, rather than human beings. And let us hope that, brushing aside the sophists and the malcontents, Congress then votes to shut down the state educational system and transfer the money to SDI.