Everyone wants to see a world without war.
But the only way to have that is to have
a world without dictators.
If "peace" movements focused on getting the criminals (i.e. the dictatorships) to disarm,
I would support them.
But they focus on getting the police (i.e. the democracies) to disarm.
Democracies disarming or refusing to go to war
in the face of dictatorships
is likely to lead to an increase in dictatorships,
and an increase in war, violence, genocide and oppression.
Pacifism and war
by Thomas Sowell
- The peace movement of the 1930s encouraged
the hawks in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
"Pacifists of the 20th century had a lot of blood on their hands
for weakening the Western democracies in the face of rising belligerence
and military might in aggressor nations like Nazi Germany and imperial Japan."
The European / UN / "anti-war"
approach to tyrants and genocide is essentially
do nothing.
This was most vividly displayed in the
Yugoslav wars of the 1990s,
when 200,000 people were butchered in their villages
an hour from Rome
while Europe did nothing.
If you do nothing,
you have no blood on your hands.
As I say, it's
seductive. I just don't know if it is moral.
Protesters With Bloody Hands
by Max Boot, February 27, 2003
- Since when have "anti-war" protesters ever been right?
Peaceniks: Warmongers for America's Enemies
by Alex Epstein
- "There is an increasingly vocal movement that seeks to engage
America in ever longer, wider, and more costly wars
- leading to thousands and perhaps millions of
unnecessary deaths. This movement calls itself the "anti-war" movement."
Blog:
"if Gandhi had been Jewish, we would have never heard of him.
Gandhi's passive resistance was a testament to British morality,
not to peace as a
weapon because Hitler never would have stopped to listen.
Gandhi's tactic worked because the British are basically good people.
Same with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."
"During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people,
urging them to surrender to the Nazis.
Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known,
he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka.
"The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife,"
he said.
"They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs."
"Collective suicide," he told his biographer, "would have been heroism.""
I have a question for Gandhi:
So the adults (several million of them!) throw themselves off cliffs.
I understand that, but how about the babies?
Should the Jews kill their children, toddlers and babies themselves,
or let the Nazis kill them,
one would like to ask the idiot Gandhi.
"The transformative power of nonviolent non-cooperation was something Gandhi had, quite literally, staked his life on, and it was an article of faith to him that it could (and should!) be applied universally."
And so he suggested the Jews apply it to Hitler:
"His suggestion shows a profound lack of understanding of human nature"
Gandhi, like so many colonial revolutionaries,
was obsessed with the idea that
Indian independence
would be the glorious promised land.
It never occurred to him there could be any downside.
It is little recognised that Gandhi's revolution led directly to
a bloodbath that killed millions,
and the setting up of the tyranny of
Pakistan,
still perhaps the main incubator of terrorism in the world today.
"By the sheer force of his personality he managed to hold together a movement
against the British that ended up with a measure of success in terms of winning Indian independence.
But that initial success was followed by the unleashing of internal forces of violence
of such an extreme nature that they dwarfed any outrages the British had committed in India.
...
Gandhi's methods were utterly powerless against the violence between Moslem and Hindu,
as opposed to his relative success against the British colonial authorities."
Reflections on Gandhi,
George Orwell, 1949:
"there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869,
did not understand the nature of totalitarianism
and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government.
...
he believed in "arousing the world," which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.
Is there a Gandhi in Russia
at this moment?"
Mahatma Gandhi on Muslim massacres of Hindus and Sikhs:
"I would tell the Hindus to face death cheerfully if the Muslims are out to kill them.
I would be a real sinner if after being stabbed I wished in my last moment that my son should seek revenge.
I must die without rancour. ...
You may turn round and ask whether all Hindus and all Sikhs should die.
Yes, I would say. Such martyrdom will not be in vain."
He criticised refugees fleeing the Pakistani jihad,
and told them to go back and die:
"I am grieved to learn that people are running away from the West Punjab and I am told that Lahore is being evacuated by the non-Muslims. I must say that this is what it should not be. If you think Lahore is dead or is dying, do not run away from it, but die with what you think is the dying Lahore."
Hitler actually explicitly said that Gandhi's tactics would not have worked with him.
At a meeting with
Lord Halifax in 1937,
Hitler advised the British to:
"Shoot Gandhi - and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission,
shoot a dozen leading members of Congress;
and if that does not suffice, shoot two hundred and so on until order is established. You will see how quickly they will collapse as soon as you make it clear that you mean business."
Master of moral relativism,
by Yaacov Lozowick, September 1, 2004,
attacks the anti-Israel idiot
Arun Gandhi.
"Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance against an oppressor
is surely one of the most admirable political phenomena of the 20th century.
Yet ultimately his success lay in his choice of oppressor.
...
The Nazi, Soviet, Khmer Rouge, and Hutu genocidists never allowed the passivity of their victims to slow them down"
We insubordinate people
- Sarah Honig, September 10, 2004,
on the idiotic Arun Gandhi
and his equally idiotic grandfather.
Jewish Identity Can't Depend on Violence, a vile screed by Arun Gandhi, Jan 2008, where he attacks Jews
for not "forgiving" and "moving on" from the Holocaust:
"It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger."
Speak for yourself you obnoxious man.
You don't speak for me.
Gandhi actually says "the Jews" are the problem:
"We have created a culture of violence
(Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."
When faced with aggressive dictatorships,
the non-violent alternatives to war seem to be:
(a) Just let the enemy win (which seems to be the left's plan for the Iraq jihad),
or:
(b) Sanctions against the rogue country.
In general, I'm not pro-sanctions.
I tend to believe in war,
not sanctions.
This is because often (but not always)
war is the more humane option.
In 1991 in Iraq,
we can now see that war was the humane option, not sanctions.
Finishing the Gulf War and deposing Saddam in 1991
would have been far more humane than
what happened with a decade of containment, sanctions,
and Saddam's continued mass murder.
War to depose Saddam
in 1991 would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Pacifism v Pre-emption: Which kills the most people?
The tragedy of the world is that sometimes
pacifism kills the most people.
Victor Davis Hanson
- "The truth is that one can sound moral only through the advocacy of restraint,
never preemption. Appeasement wins applause for its ethical posturing and non-belligerency;
and even when the corpses later pile up it rarely earns the disgust it deserves
for getting thousands killed. In contrast, preemption is always equated with blood lust;
and even when it saves thousands, critics sigh that in retrospect there must have been a better way."
World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win
by Norman Podhoretz, September 2004
- Details the long history of American and western weakness
in the face of growing Islamism
since 1979 (or even 1968)
that led to 9/11.
Western weakness encourages war:
"The sheer audacity of what bin Laden went on to do on September 11
was unquestionably a product of his contempt for American power. Our persistent refusal
for so long to use that power against him and his terrorist brethren
..
reinforced his conviction that we were a nation on the way down,
destined to be defeated"
"Bin Laden was not the first enemy of a democratic regime to have been emboldened
by such impressions. In the 1930's, Adolf Hitler was convinced by the failure of the British
to arm themselves against the threat he posed,
as well as by the policy of appeasement they adopted toward him,
that they were decadent and would never fight no matter how many countries he invaded."
And so it was with the Soviets, with Iran, and with Saddam.
The paradox of the world is that
isolationism and pacifism encourages tyrants,
and causes war.
War should be a last resort?
"War should always be a last resort", said everyone, even Bush,
in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Yet by what criteria?
If by saving lives, it is clearly not true.
Pope John Paul II
offers a clear example of this assertion without evidence:
"War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity. International law, honest dialogue, solidarity between States, the noble exercise of diplomacy: these are methods worthy of individuals and nations in resolving their differences.
...
As the Charter of the United Nations Organization
and international law itself remind us,
war cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option."
The Catholic Church
and the UN, two bogus sources of morality
that we are meant to "respect".
Two deeply corrupt organisations with
long histories
of support for
and appeasement of
tyranny and evil.
They belong together.
Opinion surveys in US during WW2.
In 1938,
the majority said they were totally opposed to bombing civilians in war.
A few years later, the majority openly support the worst sort of attacks on civilians,
once it became a global war for survival.
"As a school in brutality, war in unsurpassed."
War against Russia in 1917
would have saved 100 million lives.
The 1914-18 War, World War One, achieved nothing.
But War against Russia in 1917
would have been possibly
the most noble, useful, successful, life-saving war in history.
Tragically, the democracies fought the 1914-18 War
instead.
After winning the Cold War, instead of retiring into isolation and grateful peace,
America should be trying to detect new threats
before they become as threatening as the old Soviet Union.
The prophetic neo-con text
National Interest and Global Responsibility
by Robert Kagan and William Kristol, 2000, says:
"A strong America capable of projecting force quickly and with devastating effect to important regions of the world
would make it less likely that challengers to regional stability will attempt to alter the status quo in their favor.
It might even deter such challengers from undertaking expensive efforts to arm themselves in the first place.
...
In Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East, the message we should be sending to potential foes is:
"Don't even think about it." That kind of deterrence offers the best recipe for lasting peace,
it is much cheaper than fighting the wars that would follow
should we fail to build such a deterrent capacity."
"With the necessary military strength,
... the United States can set about making trouble for hostile and potentially hostile nations,
rather than waiting for them to make trouble for us. Just as the most successful strategy in the Cold War
combined containment of the Soviet Union with an effort to undermine the moral legitimacy of the Moscow regime,
so in the post-Cold War era a principal aim of American foreign policy should be to bring about a change of regime
in hostile nations
- in Baghdad and Belgrade, in Pyongyang and Beijing, and wherever tyrannical governments acquire the military power
to threaten their neighbors, our allies and the United States itself."
Two unthinkable wars,
that would have been condemned by the world,
but would have saved millions of lives:
Had the US used its brief nuclear weapons monopoly
(which lasted from 1945 to 1949)
to depose Stalin in 1945,
it would have saved millions of lives.
Had the US used its nuclear weapons monopoly
to depose Mao in 1949,
it would have saved tens of millions of lives.
The Fruits of Appeasement,
by Victor Davis Hanson, makes this point well.
The US should have killed the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
- "the willingness to use force
against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war,
saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn
each generation".
He argues that 1979-2001 has been one long story of weakness and
appeasement of Islamism.
But it is still not too late.
Islamism is still relatively new and weak.
We are not too late to destroy it before it gets strong.
"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed,
if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly,
you may come to the moment when
you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival.
There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory,
because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
- Winston Churchill,
"The Gathering Storm", 1948,
on going to war early when the enemy is weak,
rather than later when he is strong.
Since 1995.
