I'd like to say that if you think you can't opose violence without violence your quite wrong and really need to do a bit of research.
I'm getting tired of everyone acting as though I've never heard of Gandhi or MLK Jr. If you'd bother to read through the discussion a bit you'd know that I (and others) have already responded to this.
1. You can oppose violence without violence under many circumstances, but not all
2. Non-violent opposition to violence (as in Gandhi, American Civil Rights Movement) depends on the threat of violence by others to succeed or on the unwillingness of the protestee to actually engage in wholesale slaughter. In Gandhi's case the Brits had no predisposition to kill Indians. As a rulae they had no desire to have blood on their hands. His non-violent resistance worked precisely because he appealed to their humanity. This doesn't always work.
As an example of it not working, consider American Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King was successful in his non-violent resistance because the U.S. gov't took up the job of threatening violence for him. Nowhere is this more abundantly clear than in school desegregation. Remember Little Rock, AK? The 101st Airborne was called out to ensure the safety of the new black students. That's the army. They showed up with guns. Loaded weapons. They were needed to ensure the safety of the (unarmed) black students from the crazy racist white psychos. This is a specific example of a general principle: Martin Luther King relied on the rule of law, and the rule of law is enforced through violence whenever necessary.
It's hopelessly naive to assume from these two examples that non-violent opposition always works. It works under given conditions. And it should be relied on first. But the fact is that unless the US and allies had invaded Nazi there would have been no one to bring rule of law. And the Nazi's were quite content to bring whole sale slaughter to the Jews and other undesirables in ways that the Brits never were. So, quite simply, passive resistance during WW2 would have been disastrous.
Gandhi proved that a peaceful process can work under some circumstances. You're foolish if you think he proved a peaceful process will always work, regardless of the circumstances.
I have already replied to the old "Treaty of Versailles caused WW2" debate. The short version is this:
1. There was no way to rewrite the Treaty of Versailles to not give someone an incentive to go to war.
2. In general, the theory that if you take away motives for war humans will return to their default state of peace is ridiculous. People are animals. Our default state is violence and victory to the strong. It is by imposing limits - under threat of violence - on the strong that peace can be achieved and nurtured. In the context of peace, non-violent resistance works, but it only takes one aggressor to destroy peace. In that situation, the aggressor (if determined) must be countered with violence or not at all.
Let's get rid of a sticky issue: there are no inherently evil people (except psychopaths maybe), just people that found that a way that looks evil for you works for them
I'm fine with that. But it's equally naive to assume people are inherently good. And the potential to get what you want with violence will always be there. And people will always want what they don't have: even if everyone was equal some would want more. The potential for violence will not go away until human nature is fundamentally changed. That takes time. And peace. And without the threat, and sometimes use, of violence that peace can not be maintained.
Robbers usually come from a social background that gave them few choices (few Harvard graduates turn into street criminals); they calculate that breaking the rules of society is more advantageous for them than respecting them.
This is a hypothesis without any proof. You see that poor people are criminals, you assume they want to get money to alleviate poverty. That's a theory. Another theory is that people who try to get money by theft have picked a really stupid way to get money and end up poor. Which is the cause, the poverty or the crime? Or perhaps both are caused by other factors?
If you alleviate poverty you will alleviate crime, but you will never eliminate it. Rich people steal too. They also murder and rape. It's hopelessly naive to think if people just had enough stuff they'd stop hurting each other. By all means, I support your efforts to use education, functional welfare, etc. to reduce poverty, crime and violence. Those are good, practical objectives. But they will never eliminate the propensity of some people to do violence to others. And as long as there is violence, there must needs be a violent force to oppose it or the violence will grow unchecked. This is true both on a macro and a micro scale. Work to increase peace, please, it's a noble and worthwhile endeavor. But unless you're protected by people willing to commit violence to defend you and your efforts, nothing will prevent one violent man (or one violent nation) from erasing all you've ever worked for.
What this all boils down to is this. People note that if you take non-violent steps (problem-solving, etc.) violence is reduced. This true. They therefore assume that it can be eliminated. This is not true. Furthermore, assuming that it can be eliminated jeopardized the very potential existence of the non-violent responses you so (rightly) propound.
That explains why the trailer park is full of people wealthier than Sam Walton could ever dream.
Absurdity aside,
This isn't "absurd", it's cold, hard economic fact. You can't get money if you can't sell goods. You can't sell goods if people don't have money to buy them. The difference between capitalism and other forms of economic venture is that capitalism depends on investment. This doesn't mean every capitalist is intelligent or rational. Some people are idiots. That has nothing to do with the economic realities behind capitalism. You can almost always get more cash short-term if you sacrifice long-term. If you mug someone, you take their wallet. You get $100. If you open a Starbucks and sell them coffee you get $2 a day, and in a year you've got way more than $100. Yes, this is an overly simplistic example, but the point is that muggers don't prove capitalism is evil, they prove that muggers aren't good capitalists.
the wealth of the British Crown was built in large part on selling salt to Indian peasants, and opium to Chinese rice farmers. Well... that point doesn't entirely escape absurdity either, I admit.
Empires concentrate wealth in the hands of a privileged elite. What this means is that an Empire can look a lot richer than it really is, but you're naive if you can't see past the gold-trim. If the UK had really been as powerful as it appeared, the American Revolution would have been crushed. As a result of non-capitalist tendencies the Brits had barely enough money to keep up appearances. Empires are not good examples of capitalism because capitalism requires, among other things, free markets, personal property rights, and free labor. To the degree that these things are lacking you can't fault capitalism. That's like complaining that your network is slow when you're trying to plug cat3 cable into a cat5 port.
Really? I'd hope he would resist as strongly as possible the urge to pull the trigger.
What "urge to pull the trigger"? If I had to pull a gun on someone and use it, I would be shocked and disappointed to find myself with an innate urge to draw blood. Killing someone is not only ethically difficult, it's psychologically difficult. In WW2 (or perhaps Korea) a study was conducted of how many American soldiers actually aimed their weapons at enemies when firing in combat. I don't remember the numbers, but it was a very low percentage. Most just sort of fired in the general direction. The reason? Even in combat it's hard to willfully kill. As a result, the American armed forces began training troops with humanoid targets (as opposed to abstract ones like bullseyes). This desensitized them to the extent that their ability to actually aim for enemy targets in combat was drastically increased. The point? Most people don't like to kill, even with a gun from far away.
Why not just point the gun at the criminal and tell him to back up with his hands in the air?
Many innocent people are killed with their own weapon every year because of this mentality. Someone has broken into your house with the intent to harm. Do you think they are in their right mind? Thinking ratinoally? There's a good chance they are on meth or some other drug. Asking them to "put their hands in the air" is likely to get you a bullet in your face if they are armed.
If you're aiming at someone in a well-lit, empty warehouse, then I'm sure the old "stick 'em up" may be a valid response, but in a 10X11 bedroom with each person having a 3" armspan you've got 4 or 5 feet of space if you've both got your backs to the wall. You're depending on the assailant:
1. being rational 2. actually seeing/believing you really have a loaded weapon 3. actually believing you will use it.
This last point it the most critical. If someone knew you well enough, they'd know how reluctant you'd be to fire. They could easily capitalize on this to overcome you even if they were unarmed. Now they have you're loaded weapon, congratulations.
Here's the key, IF you strategy were to work (and you'd be needlessly and dangerously wasting the lives of your family to try it out) it is precisely because there are people in the world who will fire the weapon. Since the assailant doesn't know if you're a pacifist or not, he would be (more) likely to take your threat seriously. In other words: you're depending on the existence of non-pacifists to provide your threat validity.
This is what annoys me about (most) pacifists. They refuse to engage in violence as though it's somehow a sacrifice on their part. No normal humans like violence. On top of that, they act as though they have the moral high ground when in fact they depend on non-pacifists for protection.
Please read some of the other posts on this subject. Seriously. Like, before you just repeat what's been repeated by people repeating other people before you repeated them.
Hitler was a racist, and hated Jews. There is no denying that. First, he merely treated them as second class citizens. He disrespected them and restricted their rights. After some years of war, he decided that Jews were hoarding wealth he needed, so he stole their money, and made them work as slaves. After more years of war, when food was running short, he started exterminating them.
Kristelnacht is not what I would call "disrespect".
Now you could say that Hitler was hellbent on killing them from the start, but the fact is that the war itself caused much of the mass starvation.
What I would really say is that the threshold for military invetion was met before they turned the ovens on. I'd say about the time they locked the Jews up in the ghettos I'd be ready to contemplate military intervention. Killing the Jews was not the original plan. As far as I know, the original plan was to ship them off to Madagascar or something. But once you're willing to treat people as subhumans the worst will inevitably follow.
All war is about killing people for money, on a mass scale. To believe otherwise is to ignore ALL of recorded history
I disagree. I'd say that war is about power, and money is a subset of that power. But I'm not disagreeing much.
What names did I call you? I don't remember calling you any. You think I wrote all that text just to call you names? I can call you names much faster.
"Hey, stupid head!"
I wrote all that text because I thought you were horribly wrong, but also respected you enough to give you a serious answer. I honestly didn't mean to offend you. If I was a little too harsh, just take a look at how many posts I'm running at once here.
America, nor its allies entered the war because the Germans were doing horrible things to the jews and other "undesirables".
Blah blah blah. You're stating the obvious. Please catch up before posting.
1. American non-pacifist resistance started well before it's entry into the war.
2. None of this matters anyway. The point isn't "America rushed to save the poor Jews, rah rah!" We all know that's not what happened. The point is "If you'd been around in 1941 and knew what Hitler was up to, would you have opted to go to war or to stay home and let the Jews burn because 'war is not the answer'". The 'WW2 question' is a hypothetical based on history, not a referendum on what actually happened.
Morality is never the reason for war. It is only a marketing jingle used to get the support of the masses.
Right, and that's not some damn silly slogan either? It makes no sense to say any one simplistic thing as "the reason" for war. No one is seriously saying all Americans got together and generated a consensus morality about going to war, but saying that no soldier and no leader felt the moral obligation of going to war is just as stupid.
Newsflash: trying not to be violent is not pacifist. That's just being decent. Pacifist means you oppose war and violence as a means to settling disputes (ripped from Wikipedia). I'm not interested in listening to you try and sound superior for putting your "energies towardsa non-violent solution, rather than violence itself". This is the pinacle of moral hypocrisy: it's more important for you to keep your dainty hands lilly white and guilt free than to actually risk your conscience trying to do something as lowly and abject as defend innocent human beings.
I've already covered the Versailles Treaty. It did not cause WW2. First of all, it had nothing to do with Japanese agression. 2nd of all, it did make Hitler's rise to power easier, but the only way to have appeased Germany would have been to give them the Sudetenland, Poland, and Austira. Guess how lives in the Sudetenland? That's right, the Czechs. Or the Slovaks, I forget which. But they've got ties to Russia. So now Stalin starts WW2 instead. Way to go for peace.
What angers me is that people would rather have pretty phrases like: "work for peace, not against war". If that's really what youi're doing: you're not a pacifist. But you're still an idiot. I'm not trying to be a dick, but do you have any idea what the phrase "eradicate poverty" even means? Poverty is relative. That means it can not be eradicated unless all people have exactly the same goods. But guess what, that doesn't work either because people value goods subjectively. Eradicating poverty is literally impossible. That doesn't mean it's not noble, but it does mean it's stupid policy. That's like saying you want to jump to the moon. Nice thought, but a waste of time. Instead how about alleviating human suffering? How about rising the standard of living, fighting disease, and trying to make sure everyone has a good job. Believe it or not, "eradicating poverty" has a track record of destroying these goals. Don't believe me, look here: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spie gel/0,1518,363663,00.html
What you seem to think pacifism is is exactly what the Jews did when the Nazis tried to kill them. That is not what pacifism is. Pacifism is peacefull non-compliance. The Jews really could have tried to stand up for themselves both violently and non-violently. I highly suggest you read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_resistance.
Great Scots man, what planet are you living on? You think if the Jews had tried to "stand up for themselves" it would have worked? You think passive resistance works against violence? You're insane. Take a look at the history of the American Civil Rights Movement. When they desegregated schools, who did they call out to keep the black kids from being killed? That's right: THE NATIONAL GUARD. And why do you think the national guard worked? Because THEY HAD THE THREAT OF VIOLENCE. They carreid GUNS. Do you think having the National Guard outside the high school with roses and flowers would have stopped those kids from getting killed?
What would the KKK have done to the Civil Rights movement if they hadn't feared the retribution of federal law officials? They would have killed every black man, woman and child they could have found. Civil disobediance and passive resistance are noble, great strategies. They appeal to the best in us. But when Martin Luther King and Gandhi were resisting passively, they were appealing to the kind of civil support that can only come in a country that is free of tryanny. If you try that tactic in China you end up dead. Did you miss Tianeman Square? You think somehow the Jews would have fared better at the hands of people who wanted them dead then the Chinese students did at the hands of people who had no grudge against them at all? You have no idea what you are talking about. Passive resistance requires an infrastructure of freedom and order that is MAINTAINED THROUGH THREAT OF FORCE.
There can be no question of this, for the simple reason that Jews were (and still are) spread throughout the entire world, and Hitler never controlled, nor had any realistic prospect of controlling, more than a small corner of the world.
This is a statement of such historical ignorance it is utterly astonishing. If pacifists had had their way, Hitler would have had a damn site more than "a small corner of the world". British fighting spirit was not enough alone to keep the Nazi's out of UK. It took American armnaments - a steady stream of them starting well before the US entered the war. I hardly think that it's any more pacifist to send boatloads of tanks and ammunition to Britaian than it is to send an armored division, do you? So if pacifism had ruled the day, there would have been no arms to Britain and the island would have fallen.
With Britain out of the picture and America still pacifist there's no Western front. The Soviet army managed to stop the German onslaught by a whisker. Given the complete attention of the Germany army, not to mention the finest German commanders like Rommel who would no longer be dueling the Brist in North Africa, the USSR would have fallen.
Is this your idea of a "small corner of the world"? At this point Germany would have contolled everything form the UK to China to S. Africa. And then why stop there? Why not invade S. America next? It's full of resources, isn't it? What's to stop them? The only thing to stop them would have been Japan, also seeking to expand it's empire. And guess what - that means more violence.
Your historical naivete is outstanding. If pacifism had been in charge of US policy, the only safe place for Jews would have been the US. So I guess you're right - technically Hitler would probably not have killed them all. Is this what it looks like when a pacifist wins a debate?
The fact of the matter is that without US non-pacifist opposition there would have been no one left in the world to mount any opposition to German power, pacifist or otherwise. How can you be so blind as to not see that?
But there's a huge difference between violence in self-defense, and war. Those who seek war, for whatever reason, habitually try to paint the latter as if it were the former, but there's a world of difference between shooting the guy that's about to shoot you, and the game of mass murder we call war.
So you think war is never justified. You make me sick. It's like you're spitting on the graves of our WW2 vets. I don't know how else to put it. You sit, smug and comfortable, precisely because young American boys went and killed young German boys. It's easy for you to call it a game, but nations aren't individuals. They don't turn on a dime. You can't reason with a nation. When a despot like Hitler gets in power, innocent people will die. The choice is not "go to war or have peace" it's "win the war or lose the war". Not ALL wars are justified. Most aren't. But some are. All it takes is one side to start a war.
And China would be ruled by Japan...Look, I said it would be violence-free, not better.
So... China would have been ruled by Japan without violence? The Rape of Nanking doesn't count? The Japanese took it without violence? And there's no Chinese resistance? And the Japanese took China and then just stopped? They didn't take Korea? Or they did? How about the Phillipines? You think they wouldn't have expanded into Malaysia? Then maybe India? Perhaps Australia? At the very least, why not take New Zealand?
Yes, the Treaty of Versailles (right treaty, ended WWI) gave Hitler some coin with the Germans. They felt wronged, and they were ready to listen to him. But there's no reason to say they wouldn't have been ready anyway. But what are you suggesting as an alternative? A "nice" Treaty of Versailles? That did what? Give the Sudetenland back to Germany? Oops - guess now the Germans aren't as pissed, but I bet the Czechs aren't too pleased. How about giving the Germans Poland as well, since they felt that was their due? Rats, now the Germans are less and less likely to listen to Hitler, but we seem to have made the Poles and the Czechs a bit irate in the process.
It comes to this: pacifists have this entirely unrealistic and silly idea that war and violence are not the default value for humanity. Despite the fact that there's probably never been a time in the hsitory of the human race where there hasn't been armed conflict somewhere, we still think that the default is peace. This is silly result of people growing up in 1st world nations where they are not in danger for most of their lives. They think that because life as they know it is generally safe and comfortable that the world is by default a save and comfortable place. Violence, especially to most Americans, is a rare intrusion into an otherwise complacent life. So we see violence as unnatural. As though peace just happens, but violence needs a motivating cause. This is wrong.
The fact is that just as the society we take for granted that affords us our lives of relative comfort and ease is both a historic anomoly and the result of great labor and toil of those who went before, our lives of peace are also anomolous and built on top of lives that were anything but peaceful. You can't get to America as it is now, fat, lazy and relatively content, without going through 1776, the Civil War and WW2 - at the very least.
The actual fact of the matter is that when you have 6 billion people alive - all of whom have some rason to feel robbed at some point - conflict is not evitable. Your own alternate history completely failed to account for 1/2 the conflict of WW2, and didn't really account for the other 1/2 either. No matter how you slice it, violence will always be an option. As long as violence is an option for those who would do evil, it must remain an option for those who would oppose them or evil will have the opportunity to grow unchecked. I'm not saying that there must always be actual violence in progress. I'm saying that people who believe in peace have to be willing to fight for it or they will inevitably loose either their peace, their freedoms, or both.
You do realize that there are other means of opposition besides violence, even when the people you are opposing are violent, don't you?
Yes, I believe that sentiment was accurately reflected in my reference to violence as a "last resort". This sort of implies there are other resorts that come before the last one. These would be the non-violent resorts.
For further reading: In the English-speaking world, the term "concentration camp" was first used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp The Brits had had enough blood by the time Gandhi came around. That's why it worked.
Many people think that not being violent means standing idly by while people die. This is not the case.
What alternative do you have that would have brought about an end to the Holocaust before the Holocaust brought about an end to the Jews? This is a serious question.
My problem is that pacifists think non-pacifists believe everything can and should be solved with violence. Violence is the last resort, but sometimes it's the only option. This is true on a micro and a macro scale. Macro scale is our holocaust example. Micro scale is a home invasion.
Now I have a lot of respect for what you have to say about believing in the good in people. I respect that. But there's a fundamental flaw in your logic. Ghandi was not opposing people that wanted to kill him. Neither was Martin Luther King. These giants of the civil-disobediance movement were able to be successful precisely becaue they had inhereited an infrastucture of (relative) peace and did not have enemies who wished their outright death primarily. If the British had wanted all the Indians dead do you think Ghandi's resistance movement would have worked? Of course it wouldn't have. Ghandi would have been the first to die.
Obviously racist white KKK members wanted to kill Martin Luther King, but he appealed to the decency of the majority of Americans and they rallied around his cause eventually if not as soon as they should have. In these circumstances pacifism worked. And it would have been wrong of Ghandi or M. L. King to resort to terrorism or civil war first.
But because you can solve some problems non-violently does not mean you can solve them all that way. The Nazi's wanted to kill Jews. If the Jews had practiced non-violent resistanct it would have been that much easier to kill them. Sometimes war is inevitable. It's a sad fact of human nature. If person x really wants to kill you, then nothing but violence will stop them. So, you must either believe that those who wish to kill must go unopposed, or that violence be used. You can't have it both ways in all cases.
I can't tell if you're joking. I'm going to take you seroisoly.
In the real world this is a stupid strategy.
You take the punnk down with a body shot. This means upper torso. Anything else is prone to a) miss or b) fail to stop the punk (especially if he's on meth or something). There's no such thing as "shooting to wound". This is ridiculous Hollywood fantasy. In home defense, especially if you're not an expert marksmen, you shoot to kill or not at all. This is not some cheesy action film. This is homicide. You're taking a human life - or possibly losing your own. You don't roll dice and hope you manage to hit him somwhere "non vital" and yet still render him incapacitated. You kill him. It's not macho. It's not tough guy. It's not cool. I've never shot someone or killed someone. I've never even seriously hurt someone, and I pray to God I never have to. But when my family's life is on the line it's no time to play Walker: Texas Ranger.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Pacifism is not about "having peace". The world has peace at least in part as a result of wars. If, to return to the WW2 example, no one had opposed Nazism would you call that "peace"? Is it "peace" when the state can kill anyone who is deemed inferior? Is it "peace" when there is no freedom of religion, of though, of the press. Is this your idea of "peace"?
The problem with pacifism is this: it only takes one person to destroy peace. If you have 20 people in a room and one of them starts beating people up - where is the peace? All 19 people being pacifists won't bring it back if 1 person decides to get violent. Furthermore if all 19 are pacifists then who will defend the weak? If the 1 violent guy starts raping a little girl - what are the pacifists going to do? Nothing. That is my problem with pacifists. They will not stand up to evil effectively. Theoretically some pacifist may step between the man and his rape victim, get shot, and that's the end of it. Some hero.
So, do you say that some dude is doing killing, and *that* killing is bad, so I hop in and do some killing on my own, because *my* killing is good because I kill the guy doing the bad killing?
In short: yes. Maybe you think all killing is the same. I do not - and I don't think you really do either. If a man walks into a bank and starts shooting people, one by one, do you honestly believe that the cop who takes him down is doing morally the same thing? Is that seriously your opinion? I want you to answer this exact question directly.
Alternatively, one could imagine the theoretical scenario where you spend the money to mitigate the economic discrepancies so that there is no reason for war in the first place from either side.
This is as hopelessly naive as the guy that thought all violence was a result of not liking people. Now you want to say that all violence (or at least, all war) 0is the result of economic discrepency. How naive can you be? Not only is this not always the case, it almostt never is. History shows that non-democratic nations are more prone to war. That means that the war is started, for all intents and purposes, by an authoritarian ruler. E.g. somone who's already rich. When, in the history of the world, has a nation gotten together and decided by consensus "we're poor, so let's invade our neighbors". This is absurd.
Pacifists almost always have the same hopelessly childish view of violence. As though there's just one simple cause of violence. As though if you removed this simple cause, violence would go away. Violence does not need a cause. This planet is fundamentally violent. Humans are animals. Find me an animal species that has no violence. There is (practically) none. Maybe fungus or mushrooms. But among actual animals? There is no peace.
Peace is not the default state of nature. Peace is a carefully crafted, fragile construct. It must be created and maintained. It must be guarded and protected. Pacifists, by and large, treat as their natural entitlement the peace that has actually been won by the blood, sweat, tears and deaths of people who thought peace was not only worth dying for, but that it was worth killing for. The fact is that, as evil as the Nazi's were, your average German conscript was no more evil than your average American draftee. They did not deserve to die. But our American soldiers went to war to stop Hitler, and they had to kill a lot of more-or-less innocent kids on the way. It's a tragedy, and nothing to celebrate, but it was the best and the worst way to do it. It was the only way to do it, and it was worth doing.
So we killed a lot of German kids, we bombed a lot of German homes, we slaughtered a lot of German families. We made mothers and daughters, fathers and sons weep for the loved ones they lost. All in the name of peace. And after we earned that peace it is a disgrace to think that the w
How do you know I didn't support military intervention in Rwanda? I take this personally. My ancestors survived the Haun's Mill Massacre. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haun's_Mill_Massacre My people had an extermination order decreed against them that was still on the books in Missouri until the last couple of years.
I spent two years of my life in Hungary where I learned what really happened there during the 1956 uprsiing. I've seen the bullet holes in the wall. I've talked to men who stared, open mouthed, as Soviet tanks roared through their villages on the way to crush the nationalists in Budapest. I've seen old men cry in remembrance of what happened during those days, as desperate pleas to the US to intervene were ignored.
And I was angry - outraged - when the same callous shoulder was turned to Rwanda, and now to Darfur as well. You think I don't care about these things? I have never feared for my life because of my religion, but it's not so long ago in our past that I've forgotten it.
Yes, I'm angry enough that I would want to go to Darfur and fight. But what am I doing to do, alone, with my 12-guage (that I couldn't even get out of the coutry anyway?) I've called senators, I've written senators, I do what I can from where I am.
I'm wasting my time on this. You've got no idea who I am, where I've been, or what I care about. You're more than out of line to start leveling charges of racism based on political beliefs I've never espoused.
Do you think "creative, non-violent responses" would have been sufficient to end the Holocaust faster than the Holocaust ended all Jews? That's really all this boils down to.
I'm not saying that non-violent alternatives shouldn't be considered. They should. And they should be considered first. But if the other party is intent on violence and has the means to carry out that threat than no amount of creative non-violent response will stop them from carrying out their objective. Case in point: two men with shotguns break into your house to kill you and rape your wife. Short of Hollywood fantasy if they really aim to do those things, no non-violent response is going to have a genuine chance of saving your lives.
I'm NOT saying this is likely to happen to you ever. But violent acts are perpetrated every day, and they can not all be stopped through non-violent resistance. Within a framework of civil decency, non-violent protests work. But if the British had really wanted to use violence Ghandi would have been dead with all his followers. His non-violent protests worked in large part because it appealed to the better nature of his fellow and Indians and also the the British. Civil disobedience and other forms of non-violent resistance require framework and leverage that simply does not always exist, and in the end they put you in the mercy of the person you're trying to resist. If that person really wants you dead, then these tactics will fail miserably.
If you want to risk your life appealing to the men who've broken into your house to try and reach their better nature, I have genuine respect for you. If you really do have a wife and kids my respect goes down, however, since you've got an obligation to defend them. In any case, just don't try to prevent me from defending my life and my family's if it ever came to that. That's all I'm saying. If you don't want to personally use violence yourself, you don't have the right to get in the way of those who would use it to defend themselves or the innocent. The same holds true on a macro level. Sometimes the only two alternatives are to repond to violence with violence, or to be eradicated.
Pacifism means "no violence". I think pacifism, as a general rule, is silly. This means that I think "no violence" is silly.
Please show me where I went further than this and said "violence is the only means to any political end". I didn't. Violence should be a last resort, but I think it's critical that it be available as that last resort. Furthermore, I think that when violence is required, it should be used as decisively and forcefully as possible. That's all I'm saying here.
You think the only reason people kill is because they don't like each other? That's naive. A lot of the time the not-liking but comes AFTER the decision to kill. That's what dehumanization tactics are all about.
The decision to kill itself can be for a variety of reasons, from resource competition to power struggles. But in any case, killing is not always about not liking people or being angry with people. Being nice and weak can easily lead to more violence then being harsh but strong. (Not saying "harsh and strong" is always a better strategy either.) You think Japan invaded China (1930s) because they didn't like the Chinese? They didn't care about the Chinese - they wanted oil. You think Brutus killed Ceaser 'cause he didn't like him (just to bring fiction in for variety)? Need I go on? Your understanding of conflict is infantile if it boils down to "people go to war because they don't like each other". Liking people has nothing to do with war except that it's easier to kill people you don't like, so you might as well hate the person you've decided to kill.
The difference is that embracing pacifism not only won't get you a violence-free world, it's guaranteed to fail. If no one opposes the violent, the violent win. Period.
Pacifism may seem anti-violent in the short-run, but in the long run it's guaranteed to permit violence to thrive.
I really think this is a grand case of dodging the issue. I'm not trying to besmirch the honor of what he did, but at the same time it is really dodging the issue, isn't? In his case he could afford to be a conscientious objector because the rest of the country was fighting for him. If, for example, there had been a man holding a detonator rigged to blow up dynamite strapped to chairs that an entire family was tied to, and there was no one else around, what would he have done then? Refused to kill the guy? We can make it better. We can give Desmond Doss a handgun and put him in a torture chamber. Would have have refused to take another life it if meant watching people tortured to death in front of him? (Can you tell I was a philosophy major for a while?) While I respect his convictions, the fact remains that he didn't have to carry a weapon in WW2 because his comrades did.
Having said that, however, I have a lot more respect for pacifists who don't try to oppose the use of force by others. It's one thing to say that I, personally, as an individual, don't have the right to take another life. I think that position is wrong, but I have a deep respect for it. What annoys me is when people try to impose or argue for pacifism as a general rule and not as a personal ethic. That wouuld be like Desmond Doss not only refusing to carry a gun, but refusing to join the war at all and protesting WW2 back home. I have no patience for that.
Clearly this is an example of the latter, and not of the former. Thus my lack of compassion.
Your points are well taken. My WW2 test is meant to be retroactive, and not historically accurate. The objective is to make a moral point, and not to either criticize or support any actual decision made by the US.
However, just for historical accuracy, the roots of the Holocaust can be traced as early as 1933.
Starting in 1933, the Nazis set up concentration camps within Germany, many of which were established by local authorities, to hold political prisoners and "undesirables". These early concentration camps were eventually consolidated into centrally run camps, and by 1939, six large concentration camps, located in Poland, had been established. After 1939, with the beginning of the Second World War, the concentration camps increasingly became places where the enemies of the Nazis, including Jews and POWs, were either killed or forced to act as slave laborers, and kept undernourished and tortured.
As far as exlusive extermination camps, those also started before 1943:
In December, 1941, the Nazis opened Chelmno, the first of what would soon be seven extermination camps, dedicated entirely to mass extermination on an industrial scale, as opposed to the labor or concentration camps. Over three million Jews would die in these extermination camps. The method of killing at these camps was by poison gas (Zyklon B or carbon monoxide), usually in "gas chambers", although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. The bodies of those killed were destroyed in crematoria (except at Sobibór where they were cremated on outdoor pyres), and the ashes buried or scattered.
So I agree that given what we knew then, it doesn't necessarily follow that we should have gone to war for this reason. However my point is to ask the question: if you knew this was going on again (and WW2 is proof that it can happen) then would you continue to oppose military intervention? This is different from asking "don't you agree the US should have entered WW2 as/when/how it actually did?"
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I'd like to say that if you think you can't opose violence without violence your quite wrong and really need to do a bit of research.
I'm getting tired of everyone acting as though I've never heard of Gandhi or MLK Jr. If you'd bother to read through the discussion a bit you'd know that I (and others) have already responded to this.
1. You can oppose violence without violence under many circumstances, but not all
2. Non-violent opposition to violence (as in Gandhi, American Civil Rights Movement) depends on the threat of violence by others to succeed or on the unwillingness of the protestee to actually engage in wholesale slaughter. In Gandhi's case the Brits had no predisposition to kill Indians. As a rulae they had no desire to have blood on their hands. His non-violent resistance worked precisely because he appealed to their humanity. This doesn't always work.
As an example of it not working, consider American Civil Rights movement. Martin Luther King was successful in his non-violent resistance because the U.S. gov't took up the job of threatening violence for him. Nowhere is this more abundantly clear than in school desegregation. Remember Little Rock, AK? The 101st Airborne was called out to ensure the safety of the new black students. That's the army. They showed up with guns. Loaded weapons. They were needed to ensure the safety of the (unarmed) black students from the crazy racist white psychos. This is a specific example of a general principle: Martin Luther King relied on the rule of law, and the rule of law is enforced through violence whenever necessary.
It's hopelessly naive to assume from these two examples that non-violent opposition always works. It works under given conditions. And it should be relied on first. But the fact is that unless the US and allies had invaded Nazi there would have been no one to bring rule of law. And the Nazi's were quite content to bring whole sale slaughter to the Jews and other undesirables in ways that the Brits never were. So, quite simply, passive resistance during WW2 would have been disastrous.
Gandhi proved that a peaceful process can work under some circumstances. You're foolish if you think he proved a peaceful process will always work, regardless of the circumstances.
I have already replied to the old "Treaty of Versailles caused WW2" debate. The short version is this:
1. There was no way to rewrite the Treaty of Versailles to not give someone an incentive to go to war.
2. In general, the theory that if you take away motives for war humans will return to their default state of peace is ridiculous. People are animals. Our default state is violence and victory to the strong. It is by imposing limits - under threat of violence - on the strong that peace can be achieved and nurtured. In the context of peace, non-violent resistance works, but it only takes one aggressor to destroy peace. In that situation, the aggressor (if determined) must be countered with violence or not at all.
Let's get rid of a sticky issue: there are no inherently evil people (except psychopaths maybe), just people that found that a way that looks evil for you works for them
I'm fine with that. But it's equally naive to assume people are inherently good. And the potential to get what you want with violence will always be there. And people will always want what they don't have: even if everyone was equal some would want more. The potential for violence will not go away until human nature is fundamentally changed. That takes time. And peace. And without the threat, and sometimes use, of violence that peace can not be maintained.
Robbers usually come from a social background that gave them few choices (few Harvard graduates turn into street criminals); they calculate that breaking the rules of society is more advantageous for them than respecting them.
This is a hypothesis without any proof. You see that poor people are criminals, you assume they want to get money to alleviate poverty. That's a theory. Another theory is that people who try to get money by theft have picked a really stupid way to get money and end up poor. Which is the cause, the poverty or the crime? Or perhaps both are caused by other factors?
If you alleviate poverty you will alleviate crime, but you will never eliminate it. Rich people steal too. They also murder and rape. It's hopelessly naive to think if people just had enough stuff they'd stop hurting each other. By all means, I support your efforts to use education, functional welfare, etc. to reduce poverty, crime and violence. Those are good, practical objectives. But they will never eliminate the propensity of some people to do violence to others. And as long as there is violence, there must needs be a violent force to oppose it or the violence will grow unchecked. This is true both on a macro and a micro scale. Work to increase peace, please, it's a noble and worthwhile endeavor. But unless you're protected by people willing to commit violence to defend you and your efforts, nothing will prevent one violent man (or one violent nation) from erasing all you've ever worked for.
What this all boils down to is this. People note that if you take non-violent steps (problem-solving, etc.) violence is reduced. This true. They therefore assume that it can be eliminated. This is not true. Furthermore, assuming that it can be eliminated jeopardized the very potential existence of the non-violent responses you so (rightly) propound.
-stormin
-stormin
This isn't "absurd", it's cold, hard economic fact. You can't get money if you can't sell goods. You can't sell goods if people don't have money to buy them. The difference between capitalism and other forms of economic venture is that capitalism depends on investment. This doesn't mean every capitalist is intelligent or rational. Some people are idiots. That has nothing to do with the economic realities behind capitalism. You can almost always get more cash short-term if you sacrifice long-term. If you mug someone, you take their wallet. You get $100. If you open a Starbucks and sell them coffee you get $2 a day, and in a year you've got way more than $100. Yes, this is an overly simplistic example, but the point is that muggers don't prove capitalism is evil, they prove that muggers aren't good capitalists.
the wealth of the British Crown was built in large part on selling salt to Indian peasants, and opium to Chinese rice farmers. Well
Empires concentrate wealth in the hands of a privileged elite. What this means is that an Empire can look a lot richer than it really is, but you're naive if you can't see past the gold-trim. If the UK had really been as powerful as it appeared, the American Revolution would have been crushed. As a result of non-capitalist tendencies the Brits had barely enough money to keep up appearances. Empires are not good examples of capitalism because capitalism requires, among other things, free markets, personal property rights, and free labor. To the degree that these things are lacking you can't fault capitalism. That's like complaining that your network is slow when you're trying to plug cat3 cable into a cat5 port.
-stormin
Really? I'd hope he would resist as strongly as possible the urge to pull the trigger.
What "urge to pull the trigger"? If I had to pull a gun on someone and use it, I would be shocked and disappointed to find myself with an innate urge to draw blood. Killing someone is not only ethically difficult, it's psychologically difficult. In WW2 (or perhaps Korea) a study was conducted of how many American soldiers actually aimed their weapons at enemies when firing in combat. I don't remember the numbers, but it was a very low percentage. Most just sort of fired in the general direction. The reason? Even in combat it's hard to willfully kill. As a result, the American armed forces began training troops with humanoid targets (as opposed to abstract ones like bullseyes). This desensitized them to the extent that their ability to actually aim for enemy targets in combat was drastically increased. The point? Most people don't like to kill, even with a gun from far away.
Why not just point the gun at the criminal and tell him to back up with his hands in the air?
Many innocent people are killed with their own weapon every year because of this mentality. Someone has broken into your house with the intent to harm. Do you think they are in their right mind? Thinking ratinoally? There's a good chance they are on meth or some other drug. Asking them to "put their hands in the air" is likely to get you a bullet in your face if they are armed.
If you're aiming at someone in a well-lit, empty warehouse, then I'm sure the old "stick 'em up" may be a valid response, but in a 10X11 bedroom with each person having a 3" armspan you've got 4 or 5 feet of space if you've both got your backs to the wall. You're depending on the assailant:
1. being rational
2. actually seeing/believing you really have a loaded weapon
3. actually believing you will use it.
This last point it the most critical. If someone knew you well enough, they'd know how reluctant you'd be to fire. They could easily capitalize on this to overcome you even if they were unarmed. Now they have you're loaded weapon, congratulations.
Here's the key, IF you strategy were to work (and you'd be needlessly and dangerously wasting the lives of your family to try it out) it is precisely because there are people in the world who will fire the weapon. Since the assailant doesn't know if you're a pacifist or not, he would be (more) likely to take your threat seriously. In other words: you're depending on the existence of non-pacifists to provide your threat validity.
This is what annoys me about (most) pacifists. They refuse to engage in violence as though it's somehow a sacrifice on their part. No normal humans like violence. On top of that, they act as though they have the moral high ground when in fact they depend on non-pacifists for protection.
-stormin
Please read some of the other posts on this subject. Seriously. Like, before you just repeat what's been repeated by people repeating other people before you repeated them.
-stormin
Hitler was a racist, and hated Jews. There is no denying that. First, he merely treated them as second class citizens. He disrespected them and restricted their rights. After some years of war, he decided that Jews were hoarding wealth he needed, so he stole their money, and made them work as slaves. After more years of war, when food was running short, he started exterminating them.
Kristelnacht is not what I would call "disrespect".
Now you could say that Hitler was hellbent on killing them from the start, but the fact is that the war itself caused much of the mass starvation.
What I would really say is that the threshold for military invetion was met before they turned the ovens on. I'd say about the time they locked the Jews up in the ghettos I'd be ready to contemplate military intervention. Killing the Jews was not the original plan. As far as I know, the original plan was to ship them off to Madagascar or something. But once you're willing to treat people as subhumans the worst will inevitably follow.
All war is about killing people for money, on a mass scale. To believe otherwise is to ignore ALL of recorded history
I disagree. I'd say that war is about power, and money is a subset of that power. But I'm not disagreeing much.
-stormin
What names did I call you? I don't remember calling you any. You think I wrote all that text just to call you names? I can call you names much faster.
"Hey, stupid head!"
I wrote all that text because I thought you were horribly wrong, but also respected you enough to give you a serious answer. I honestly didn't mean to offend you. If I was a little too harsh, just take a look at how many posts I'm running at once here.
I'm doing the best I can!
-stormin
America, nor its allies entered the war because the Germans were doing horrible things to the jews and other "undesirables".
Blah blah blah. You're stating the obvious. Please catch up before posting.
1. American non-pacifist resistance started well before it's entry into the war.
2. None of this matters anyway. The point isn't "America rushed to save the poor Jews, rah rah!" We all know that's not what happened. The point is "If you'd been around in 1941 and knew what Hitler was up to, would you have opted to go to war or to stay home and let the Jews burn because 'war is not the answer'". The 'WW2 question' is a hypothetical based on history, not a referendum on what actually happened.
Morality is never the reason for war. It is only a marketing jingle used to get the support of the masses.
Right, and that's not some damn silly slogan either? It makes no sense to say any one simplistic thing as "the reason" for war. No one is seriously saying all Americans got together and generated a consensus morality about going to war, but saying that no soldier and no leader felt the moral obligation of going to war is just as stupid.
-stormin
Newsflash: trying not to be violent is not pacifist. That's just being decent. Pacifist means you oppose war and violence as a means to settling disputes (ripped from Wikipedia). I'm not interested in listening to you try and sound superior for putting your "energies towardsa non-violent solution, rather than violence itself". This is the pinacle of moral hypocrisy: it's more important for you to keep your dainty hands lilly white and guilt free than to actually risk your conscience trying to do something as lowly and abject as defend innocent human beings.
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I've already covered the Versailles Treaty. It did not cause WW2. First of all, it had nothing to do with Japanese agression. 2nd of all, it did make Hitler's rise to power easier, but the only way to have appeased Germany would have been to give them the Sudetenland, Poland, and Austira. Guess how lives in the Sudetenland? That's right, the Czechs. Or the Slovaks, I forget which. But they've got ties to Russia. So now Stalin starts WW2 instead. Way to go for peace.
What angers me is that people would rather have pretty phrases like: "work for peace, not against war". If that's really what youi're doing: you're not a pacifist. But you're still an idiot. I'm not trying to be a dick, but do you have any idea what the phrase "eradicate poverty" even means? Poverty is relative. That means it can not be eradicated unless all people have exactly the same goods. But guess what, that doesn't work either because people value goods subjectively. Eradicating poverty is literally impossible. That doesn't mean it's not noble, but it does mean it's stupid policy. That's like saying you want to jump to the moon. Nice thought, but a waste of time. Instead how about alleviating human suffering? How about rising the standard of living, fighting disease, and trying to make sure everyone has a good job. Believe it or not, "eradicating poverty" has a track record of destroying these goals. Don't believe me, look here: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spi
What you seem to think pacifism is is exactly what the Jews did when the Nazis tried to kill them. That is not what pacifism is. Pacifism is peacefull non-compliance. The Jews really could have tried to stand up for themselves both violently and non-violently. I highly suggest you read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_resistance.
Great Scots man, what planet are you living on? You think if the Jews had tried to "stand up for themselves" it would have worked? You think passive resistance works against violence? You're insane. Take a look at the history of the American Civil Rights Movement. When they desegregated schools, who did they call out to keep the black kids from being killed? That's right: THE NATIONAL GUARD. And why do you think the national guard worked? Because THEY HAD THE THREAT OF VIOLENCE. They carreid GUNS. Do you think having the National Guard outside the high school with roses and flowers would have stopped those kids from getting killed?
What would the KKK have done to the Civil Rights movement if they hadn't feared the retribution of federal law officials? They would have killed every black man, woman and child they could have found. Civil disobediance and passive resistance are noble, great strategies. They appeal to the best in us. But when Martin Luther King and Gandhi were resisting passively, they were appealing to the kind of civil support that can only come in a country that is free of tryanny. If you try that tactic in China you end up dead. Did you miss Tianeman Square? You think somehow the Jews would have fared better at the hands of people who wanted them dead then the Chinese students did at the hands of people who had no grudge against them at all? You have no idea what you are talking about. Passive resistance requires an infrastructure of freedom and order that is MAINTAINED THROUGH THREAT OF FORCE.
-stormin
There can be no question of this, for the simple reason that Jews were (and still are) spread throughout the entire world, and Hitler never controlled, nor had any realistic prospect of controlling, more than a small corner of the world.
This is a statement of such historical ignorance it is utterly astonishing. If pacifists had had their way, Hitler would have had a damn site more than "a small corner of the world". British fighting spirit was not enough alone to keep the Nazi's out of UK. It took American armnaments - a steady stream of them starting well before the US entered the war. I hardly think that it's any more pacifist to send boatloads of tanks and ammunition to Britaian than it is to send an armored division, do you? So if pacifism had ruled the day, there would have been no arms to Britain and the island would have fallen.
With Britain out of the picture and America still pacifist there's no Western front. The Soviet army managed to stop the German onslaught by a whisker. Given the complete attention of the Germany army, not to mention the finest German commanders like Rommel who would no longer be dueling the Brist in North Africa, the USSR would have fallen.
Is this your idea of a "small corner of the world"? At this point Germany would have contolled everything form the UK to China to S. Africa. And then why stop there? Why not invade S. America next? It's full of resources, isn't it? What's to stop them? The only thing to stop them would have been Japan, also seeking to expand it's empire. And guess what - that means more violence.
Your historical naivete is outstanding. If pacifism had been in charge of US policy, the only safe place for Jews would have been the US. So I guess you're right - technically Hitler would probably not have killed them all. Is this what it looks like when a pacifist wins a debate?
The fact of the matter is that without US non-pacifist opposition there would have been no one left in the world to mount any opposition to German power, pacifist or otherwise. How can you be so blind as to not see that?
But there's a huge difference between violence in self-defense, and war. Those who seek war, for whatever reason, habitually try to paint the latter as if it were the former, but there's a world of difference between shooting the guy that's about to shoot you, and the game of mass murder we call war.
So you think war is never justified. You make me sick. It's like you're spitting on the graves of our WW2 vets. I don't know how else to put it. You sit, smug and comfortable, precisely because young American boys went and killed young German boys. It's easy for you to call it a game, but nations aren't individuals. They don't turn on a dime. You can't reason with a nation. When a despot like Hitler gets in power, innocent people will die. The choice is not "go to war or have peace" it's "win the war or lose the war". Not ALL wars are justified. Most aren't. But some are. All it takes is one side to start a war.
Your failure to appreciate that is stunning.
-stormin
And China would be ruled by Japan...Look, I said it would be violence-free, not better.
So... China would have been ruled by Japan without violence? The Rape of Nanking doesn't count? The Japanese took it without violence? And there's no Chinese resistance? And the Japanese took China and then just stopped? They didn't take Korea? Or they did? How about the Phillipines? You think they wouldn't have expanded into Malaysia? Then maybe India? Perhaps Australia? At the very least, why not take New Zealand?
Yes, the Treaty of Versailles (right treaty, ended WWI) gave Hitler some coin with the Germans. They felt wronged, and they were ready to listen to him. But there's no reason to say they wouldn't have been ready anyway. But what are you suggesting as an alternative? A "nice" Treaty of Versailles? That did what? Give the Sudetenland back to Germany? Oops - guess now the Germans aren't as pissed, but I bet the Czechs aren't too pleased. How about giving the Germans Poland as well, since they felt that was their due? Rats, now the Germans are less and less likely to listen to Hitler, but we seem to have made the Poles and the Czechs a bit irate in the process.
It comes to this: pacifists have this entirely unrealistic and silly idea that war and violence are not the default value for humanity. Despite the fact that there's probably never been a time in the hsitory of the human race where there hasn't been armed conflict somewhere, we still think that the default is peace. This is silly result of people growing up in 1st world nations where they are not in danger for most of their lives. They think that because life as they know it is generally safe and comfortable that the world is by default a save and comfortable place. Violence, especially to most Americans, is a rare intrusion into an otherwise complacent life. So we see violence as unnatural. As though peace just happens, but violence needs a motivating cause. This is wrong.
The fact is that just as the society we take for granted that affords us our lives of relative comfort and ease is both a historic anomoly and the result of great labor and toil of those who went before, our lives of peace are also anomolous and built on top of lives that were anything but peaceful. You can't get to America as it is now, fat, lazy and relatively content, without going through 1776, the Civil War and WW2 - at the very least.
The actual fact of the matter is that when you have 6 billion people alive - all of whom have some rason to feel robbed at some point - conflict is not evitable. Your own alternate history completely failed to account for 1/2 the conflict of WW2, and didn't really account for the other 1/2 either. No matter how you slice it, violence will always be an option. As long as violence is an option for those who would do evil, it must remain an option for those who would oppose them or evil will have the opportunity to grow unchecked. I'm not saying that there must always be actual violence in progress. I'm saying that people who believe in peace have to be willing to fight for it or they will inevitably loose either their peace, their freedoms, or both.
-stormin
You do realize that there are other means of opposition besides violence, even when the people you are opposing are violent, don't you?
Yes, I believe that sentiment was accurately reflected in my reference to violence as a "last resort". This sort of implies there are other resorts that come before the last one. These would be the non-violent resorts.
-stormin
Pacifism doesn't mean just laying down and rolling over.
Apparently it doesn't mean "reading Slashdot posts before you hit 'reply'" either.
-stormin
Thank you. You are dead on.
For further reading: In the English-speaking world, the term "concentration camp" was first used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp The Brits had had enough blood by the time Gandhi came around. That's why it worked.
-stormin
Yes.
Many people think that not being violent means standing idly by while people die. This is not the case.
What alternative do you have that would have brought about an end to the Holocaust before the Holocaust brought about an end to the Jews? This is a serious question.
My problem is that pacifists think non-pacifists believe everything can and should be solved with violence. Violence is the last resort, but sometimes it's the only option. This is true on a micro and a macro scale. Macro scale is our holocaust example. Micro scale is a home invasion.
Now I have a lot of respect for what you have to say about believing in the good in people. I respect that. But there's a fundamental flaw in your logic. Ghandi was not opposing people that wanted to kill him. Neither was Martin Luther King. These giants of the civil-disobediance movement were able to be successful precisely becaue they had inhereited an infrastucture of (relative) peace and did not have enemies who wished their outright death primarily. If the British had wanted all the Indians dead do you think Ghandi's resistance movement would have worked? Of course it wouldn't have. Ghandi would have been the first to die.
Obviously racist white KKK members wanted to kill Martin Luther King, but he appealed to the decency of the majority of Americans and they rallied around his cause eventually if not as soon as they should have. In these circumstances pacifism worked. And it would have been wrong of Ghandi or M. L. King to resort to terrorism or civil war first.
But because you can solve some problems non-violently does not mean you can solve them all that way. The Nazi's wanted to kill Jews. If the Jews had practiced non-violent resistanct it would have been that much easier to kill them. Sometimes war is inevitable. It's a sad fact of human nature. If person x really wants to kill you, then nothing but violence will stop them. So, you must either believe that those who wish to kill must go unopposed, or that violence be used. You can't have it both ways in all cases.
-stormin
I can't tell if you're joking. I'm going to take you seroisoly.
In the real world this is a stupid strategy.
You take the punnk down with a body shot. This means upper torso. Anything else is prone to a) miss or b) fail to stop the punk (especially if he's on meth or something). There's no such thing as "shooting to wound". This is ridiculous Hollywood fantasy. In home defense, especially if you're not an expert marksmen, you shoot to kill or not at all. This is not some cheesy action film. This is homicide. You're taking a human life - or possibly losing your own. You don't roll dice and hope you manage to hit him somwhere "non vital" and yet still render him incapacitated. You kill him. It's not macho. It's not tough guy. It's not cool. I've never shot someone or killed someone. I've never even seriously hurt someone, and I pray to God I never have to. But when my family's life is on the line it's no time to play Walker: Texas Ranger.
-stormin
Pacifism is about having peace.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Pacifism is not about "having peace". The world has peace at least in part as a result of wars. If, to return to the WW2 example, no one had opposed Nazism would you call that "peace"? Is it "peace" when the state can kill anyone who is deemed inferior? Is it "peace" when there is no freedom of religion, of though, of the press. Is this your idea of "peace"?
The problem with pacifism is this: it only takes one person to destroy peace. If you have 20 people in a room and one of them starts beating people up - where is the peace? All 19 people being pacifists won't bring it back if 1 person decides to get violent. Furthermore if all 19 are pacifists then who will defend the weak? If the 1 violent guy starts raping a little girl - what are the pacifists going to do? Nothing. That is my problem with pacifists. They will not stand up to evil effectively. Theoretically some pacifist may step between the man and his rape victim, get shot, and that's the end of it. Some hero.
So, do you say that some dude is doing killing, and *that* killing is bad, so I hop in and do some killing on my own, because *my* killing is good because I kill the guy doing the bad killing?
In short: yes. Maybe you think all killing is the same. I do not - and I don't think you really do either. If a man walks into a bank and starts shooting people, one by one, do you honestly believe that the cop who takes him down is doing morally the same thing? Is that seriously your opinion? I want you to answer this exact question directly.
Alternatively, one could imagine the theoretical scenario where you spend the money to mitigate the economic discrepancies so that there is no reason for war in the first place from either side.
This is as hopelessly naive as the guy that thought all violence was a result of not liking people. Now you want to say that all violence (or at least, all war) 0is the result of economic discrepency. How naive can you be? Not only is this not always the case, it almostt never is. History shows that non-democratic nations are more prone to war. That means that the war is started, for all intents and purposes, by an authoritarian ruler. E.g. somone who's already rich. When, in the history of the world, has a nation gotten together and decided by consensus "we're poor, so let's invade our neighbors". This is absurd.
Pacifists almost always have the same hopelessly childish view of violence. As though there's just one simple cause of violence. As though if you removed this simple cause, violence would go away. Violence does not need a cause. This planet is fundamentally violent. Humans are animals. Find me an animal species that has no violence. There is (practically) none. Maybe fungus or mushrooms. But among actual animals? There is no peace.
Peace is not the default state of nature. Peace is a carefully crafted, fragile construct. It must be created and maintained. It must be guarded and protected. Pacifists, by and large, treat as their natural entitlement the peace that has actually been won by the blood, sweat, tears and deaths of people who thought peace was not only worth dying for, but that it was worth killing for. The fact is that, as evil as the Nazi's were, your average German conscript was no more evil than your average American draftee. They did not deserve to die. But our American soldiers went to war to stop Hitler, and they had to kill a lot of more-or-less innocent kids on the way. It's a tragedy, and nothing to celebrate, but it was the best and the worst way to do it. It was the only way to do it, and it was worth doing.
So we killed a lot of German kids, we bombed a lot of German homes, we slaughtered a lot of German families. We made mothers and daughters, fathers and sons weep for the loved ones they lost. All in the name of peace. And after we earned that peace it is a disgrace to think that the w
F*** you.
How do you know I didn't support military intervention in Rwanda? I take this personally. My ancestors survived the Haun's Mill Massacre. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haun's_Mill_Massacre My people had an extermination order decreed against them that was still on the books in Missouri until the last couple of years.
I spent two years of my life in Hungary where I learned what really happened there during the 1956 uprsiing. I've seen the bullet holes in the wall. I've talked to men who stared, open mouthed, as Soviet tanks roared through their villages on the way to crush the nationalists in Budapest. I've seen old men cry in remembrance of what happened during those days, as desperate pleas to the US to intervene were ignored.
And I was angry - outraged - when the same callous shoulder was turned to Rwanda, and now to Darfur as well. You think I don't care about these things? I have never feared for my life because of my religion, but it's not so long ago in our past that I've forgotten it.
Yes, I'm angry enough that I would want to go to Darfur and fight. But what am I doing to do, alone, with my 12-guage (that I couldn't even get out of the coutry anyway?) I've called senators, I've written senators, I do what I can from where I am.
I'm wasting my time on this. You've got no idea who I am, where I've been, or what I care about. You're more than out of line to start leveling charges of racism based on political beliefs I've never espoused.
-stormin
Do you think "creative, non-violent responses" would have been sufficient to end the Holocaust faster than the Holocaust ended all Jews? That's really all this boils down to.
I'm not saying that non-violent alternatives shouldn't be considered. They should. And they should be considered first. But if the other party is intent on violence and has the means to carry out that threat than no amount of creative non-violent response will stop them from carrying out their objective. Case in point: two men with shotguns break into your house to kill you and rape your wife. Short of Hollywood fantasy if they really aim to do those things, no non-violent response is going to have a genuine chance of saving your lives.
I'm NOT saying this is likely to happen to you ever. But violent acts are perpetrated every day, and they can not all be stopped through non-violent resistance. Within a framework of civil decency, non-violent protests work. But if the British had really wanted to use violence Ghandi would have been dead with all his followers. His non-violent protests worked in large part because it appealed to the better nature of his fellow and Indians and also the the British. Civil disobedience and other forms of non-violent resistance require framework and leverage that simply does not always exist, and in the end they put you in the mercy of the person you're trying to resist. If that person really wants you dead, then these tactics will fail miserably.
If you want to risk your life appealing to the men who've broken into your house to try and reach their better nature, I have genuine respect for you. If you really do have a wife and kids my respect goes down, however, since you've got an obligation to defend them. In any case, just don't try to prevent me from defending my life and my family's if it ever came to that. That's all I'm saying. If you don't want to personally use violence yourself, you don't have the right to get in the way of those who would use it to defend themselves or the innocent. The same holds true on a macro level. Sometimes the only two alternatives are to repond to violence with violence, or to be eradicated.
-stormin
is often sensitive to tools other than violence
Pacifism means "no violence". I think pacifism, as a general rule, is silly. This means that I think "no violence" is silly.
Please show me where I went further than this and said "violence is the only means to any political end". I didn't. Violence should be a last resort, but I think it's critical that it be available as that last resort. Furthermore, I think that when violence is required, it should be used as decisively and forcefully as possible. That's all I'm saying here.
-stormin
You think the only reason people kill is because they don't like each other? That's naive. A lot of the time the not-liking but comes AFTER the decision to kill. That's what dehumanization tactics are all about.
The decision to kill itself can be for a variety of reasons, from resource competition to power struggles. But in any case, killing is not always about not liking people or being angry with people. Being nice and weak can easily lead to more violence then being harsh but strong. (Not saying "harsh and strong" is always a better strategy either.) You think Japan invaded China (1930s) because they didn't like the Chinese? They didn't care about the Chinese - they wanted oil. You think Brutus killed Ceaser 'cause he didn't like him (just to bring fiction in for variety)? Need I go on? Your understanding of conflict is infantile if it boils down to "people go to war because they don't like each other". Liking people has nothing to do with war except that it's easier to kill people you don't like, so you might as well hate the person you've decided to kill.
-stormin
The difference is that embracing pacifism not only won't get you a violence-free world, it's guaranteed to fail. If no one opposes the violent, the violent win. Period.
Pacifism may seem anti-violent in the short-run, but in the long run it's guaranteed to permit violence to thrive.
-stormin
I really think this is a grand case of dodging the issue. I'm not trying to besmirch the honor of what he did, but at the same time it is really dodging the issue, isn't? In his case he could afford to be a conscientious objector because the rest of the country was fighting for him. If, for example, there had been a man holding a detonator rigged to blow up dynamite strapped to chairs that an entire family was tied to, and there was no one else around, what would he have done then? Refused to kill the guy? We can make it better. We can give Desmond Doss a handgun and put him in a torture chamber. Would have have refused to take another life it if meant watching people tortured to death in front of him? (Can you tell I was a philosophy major for a while?) While I respect his convictions, the fact remains that he didn't have to carry a weapon in WW2 because his comrades did.
Having said that, however, I have a lot more respect for pacifists who don't try to oppose the use of force by others. It's one thing to say that I, personally, as an individual, don't have the right to take another life. I think that position is wrong, but I have a deep respect for it. What annoys me is when people try to impose or argue for pacifism as a general rule and not as a personal ethic. That wouuld be like Desmond Doss not only refusing to carry a gun, but refusing to join the war at all and protesting WW2 back home. I have no patience for that.
Clearly this is an example of the latter, and not of the former. Thus my lack of compassion.
-stormin
However, just for historical accuracy, the roots of the Holocaust can be traced as early as 1933.
As far as exlusive extermination camps, those also started before 1943:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust
So I agree that given what we knew then, it doesn't necessarily follow that we should have gone to war for this reason. However my point is to ask the question: if you knew this was going on again (and WW2 is proof that it can happen) then would you continue to oppose military intervention? This is different from asking "don't you agree the US should have entered WW2 as/when/how it actually did?"
Does the distinction make sense?
-stormin