An pacifist explains why he refuses to wear a poppy.
I refrain from wearing a poppy to criticize the use of military force, at the expense of soldiers, civilians and their families, by the state – any state – in order to achieve political goals, no matter how noble.
[…]
Of course, the question must be addressed, “Faced with the Nazi menace, what were we to do?” Mahatma Gandhi, who also faced oppressive imperial forces during his lifetime, said, “Non-violence is a weapon of the strong.” When faced with oppression and injustice, sometimes it can be easier to lash out in violent reaction – one that will further propagate the conflict, perhaps sowing seeds of future conflicts – than to react in a constructive, non-violent way that will actually resolve the conflict, giving rise to things such as true freedom and democracy. What would Gandhi have done in Poland or Germany if he were faced with the advance of the Third Reich and witness to the holocaust?
Perhaps, in protest, he would have joined a line up of Jewish people waiting to board a train to Auschwitz. Would you have the courage to make that sacrifice? Would I?
Hopefully, we’ll never have to find out.
Someone, buy this man a plane ticket to North Korea.
Gandhi refused to see the realities of human nature; of Islamic doctrine with its ambition of domination; of the modern mentality with its resentment of autocratic impositions; of people’s daily needs making them willing to collaborate with the rulers in exchange for career and business opportunities; of the nationalism of the Hindus who would oppose the partition of their Motherland tooth and nail; of the nature of the Pakistani state as intrinsically anti-India and anti-Hindu.
In most of these cases, Gandhi’s mistake was not his pacifism per se…The Khilafat pogroms revealed one of the real problems with his pacifism: all while riding a high horse and imposing strict conformity with the pacifist principle, he indirectly provoked far more violence than was in his power to control. Other leaders of the freedom movement, such as Annie Besant and Lala Lajpat Rai, had warned him that he was playing with fire, but he preferred to obey his suprarational “inner voice”.
The fundamental problem with Gandhi’s pacifism, not in the initial stages but when he had become the world-famous leader of India’s freedom movement (1920-47), was his increasing extremism. All sense of proportion had vanished when he advocated non-violence not as a technique of moral pressure by a weaker on a stronger party, but as a form of masochistic surrender…
During his prayer meeting on 1 May 1947, he prepared the Hindus and Sikhs for the anticipated massacres of their kind in the upcoming state of Pakistan with these words: “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.” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol.LXXXVII, p.394-5) It is left unexplained what purpose would be served by this senseless and avoidable surrender to murder.
Even when the killing had started, Gandhi refused to take pity on the Hindu victims, much less to point fingers at the Pakistani aggressors. More importantly for the principle of non-violence, he failed to offer them a non-violent technique of countering and dissuading the murderers. Instead, he told the Hindu refugees from Pakistan to go back and die. On 6 August 1947, Gandhiji commented to Congress workers on the incipient communal conflagration in Lahore thus: “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…”
http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com/2005/09/varieties-of-pacifism-part-i-gandhis.html
Never before have I been so approving of a public stoning.
I’m not sure I understand the concept here. The nazi’s are exteminating millions of people. To stop them the best course of action is to volunteer for extermination as well? Are the nazis expected to cave to the pressure of civil disobedience? That’s pretty disconnected from reality. The far more probable outcome would be for them to say “Thank you for making this easier”, and then put them in the oven.
“You’ve hit rock bottom when you begin to believe peace is a dirty word and anyone who promotes peace and non violence is your enemy.”
This misses the point. “Peace” is not a dirty word for anyone here, certainly not me. Nor is the promotion of peace or non-violence. There are two main objections to this Clay McLeod.
(1) Most here disagree strongly that signalling willingness to capitulate promotes peace. Rather, it promotes violent aggression. McLeod wants the flower (peace) without the root and stem, and so he wants it in vain. [Ghandi’s reputed success was exceptional (i.e. an exception) and turned on the unique confluences of politics and religion in India at the time and his own genius. Further, the Hindu grad students from India I have discussed this with almost universally condemn Ghandi for having made India’s problems worse in the long run. In their opinion, Ghandi is a mythic hero to Christians outside India.]
(2) McLeod states or implies that those who sacrificed themselves for us should be dispised, having chosen to combat Nazism rather than surrender to it. This is the sickening aspect of his thesis. It would be one thing if he objected to the poppy symbol because too many people (in his opnion) in fact misinterpret the poppy as glorification of war, despite the fact it is meant to glorify heroic sacrifice. But, sadly, his article shows that in his muddled thinking he cannot distinguish glorifying the heroic element of the deed–derived from its context–from the deed divorced from context. Happily, most can.
Why is it that the left can�t elevate their arguments beyond �Sesame Street� diplomacy? It is very simplistic to simply state that all war is bad, or that violence solves nothing. It certainly sounds more tolerant, or more loving, but is it? And if we accept the Left�s views on tolerance and globalism, how do we condemn a society that doesn�t agree with these values? Tolerance is very easy when no one confronts you with violence, and non-violence only works where the other side actually shares moral values with you. Ghandi was a very lucky fellow the British were culturally sensitized enough not to just kill him and a few thousand other non-violent protesters. After all, how would non-violent struggle fare when faced with a culture that sees surrender as shaming and one who surrenders, but refuses to see the shame, as utterly contemptible? I guess we should be happy the Japanese didn�t get a chance to rule Ghandi�s India. (My cousin died at the battle of Imphal so the Japanese didn’t get that chance)
Fortunately, we can see exactly how far tolerance goes with the left. Ensconced in the safety of a free and democratic imperialist society, they can attack anyone who disagrees with their tolerance. From throwing Oreo cookies and hurling �Uncle Tom�s at black republicans, to glorifying artistic attacks like �Piss Christ�, the left shows exactly how tolerance is supposed to work. But I have to wonder how willingly the globalists will tell an Iranian court it�s OK to hang teen-aged homosexuals? After all, that is their culture. Will they sit quietly chanting when they come to kill more Jews? Unlike some, I doubt non-violent protest will hinder committed anti-Semites.
Moral equivalence is the happy song sung by three year olds on the playground. It sound beautiful and we love children of different cultures getting along. But is doesn�t save the women of sub-saharan Africa from genital mutilation, or the homosexuals of Iran from public execution. It doesn�t remove the burqa in Afghanistan or stop honour killings in Pakistan and India. It is every person�s responsibility to stand up and protect the real victims of this world from that violence. It is a responsibility to say that culture is not an excuse for atrocity. And if I sound like a cultural imperialist I won�t apologize for it because, in my society, we tolerate different opinions, no matter how whacky, but we don�t tolerate violence against others. We defend those who need protection. With violence, if necessary.
Many need to simplify matters into black or white, not wanting the deeper questions asked. We remember the sacrificed but do little to seek the reasons.
Following “the war to end all wars” what set nations at each others throats 20 years later? In the depth of the Depression, did war substitute for useful employment?
The inescapable fact is, that there war-lovers have always existed.
Of great suspicion is the jailing for life, until he died in jail, of one of the lesser Nazis, Rudolf Hess. Could he have saved millions of lives? Did a stubborn Churchill prolong the war? Consider the following:
In one of the most startling events of WWII Rudolf Hess made his famous solo airplane flight in a ME 110 to Scotland and arrived unexpectedly in May 1941. On landing he was immediately taken as a prisoner of war by the British, but he demanded to see the Marquess of Clydesdale, whom he said he had met at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He claimed his mission was to seek a peace between Germany and Britain so that jointly they could wage war against the Soviet Union. Clydesdale had indeed attended the Olympics, but always claimed he had never met Hess, who by that time was becoming a marginal figure in the Third Reich; although because of personal loyalty based on their early joint struggles in the Nazi Party Hitler kept him in the public eye. Churchill refused to see Hess while the Nazis declared him mental unconscious …
I won’t merely remember. I will ask why.
If WWIII happens, it will be partly due to the facilitation of evil via leftism.
Same as happened with WWII. The left today, as then, wants the civilized world to stay out of the affairs of the malevolent world. The result: the malevolent world attacks the civilized world when attacking their own innocents becomes insufficient for them.
The first major warning of this to North America happened on 9/11/2001. The left doesn’t want to accept it as a warning of greater evil to come. And that’s frightening.
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” J.S. Mill
Feisty says: “Ghandi was a very lucky fellow the British were culturally sensitized enough not to just kill him and a few thousand other non-violent protesters.”
As always, these theoretical debates about the necessity of war come down to one word: civilization, or the lack thereof.
If you meet a man late at night in a dark alley, you had better hope he is a civilized man. The same idea holds true of any situation where one person or group has power over another: country versus country, state versus citizen, or individual versus individual.
It is fascinating to witness the contradictory arguments made by the left, safely protected by the laws and customs of a civlized society. On the one hand they argue righteously for the subjugation of free-born citizens to ever-more regulation by the state with regards to curbing vices like greed and over-consumption.
Having fully accepted that state intervention is the only effective check on the darker side of human nature when it comes to the citizen, they then proceed to make the incredibly simplistic, absolute rule that no country should ever go to war against another, even to defend itself against the most barbaric, sadistic regime the world has ever known.
Is this the kind of “free thinker” the public education system is aiming to replicate? God help us.
Rudolf Hess had already taken a hard left turn into the ozone by the time he flew off to England. As far as I think can be discerned, Hess’s motive was an attempt to regain Hitler’s favor, which he sensed he was rapidly falling out of, by negotiating a peace agreement with Great Britain. However, Hitler had always been quite vocal about the idea that he didn’t want to fight England, and that the two countries should team up to fight the Soviets. This wasn’t some remarkable innovation by Hess. All that would have been required was for the British to acquiesce to Nazi rule of the continent, and no doubt at some later date hand over all of their Jews. Poor old “stubborn” Churchill, no doubt because he was a tool of the Zionist lobby, just couldn’t bring himself to say “OK.”
“Ask a Japanese Canadian who spent time in a WWII internment camp and whose family was stripped of its property whether his or her “freedom” was safeguarded by the efforts of Canada’s soldiers.”
Wot a looser
Yeah well my family has Ukranian blood and I’ve been to their internment camp,
That’s the problem with immigraton it allows threats to national security.
The Japanese were a threat those bastards. I mean they did a few attacks in BC not just firebombing but shelling, etc.
I know the writer is too dumb to know but all the people in uniform who died gave up freedoms to. Little things, weekends off, the right to not go over the top…