Posted on 11/12/2006 6:27:25 AM PST by Valin
I was in a recent discussion about the war on terror and the nature of the Radical Wahhabi sect of Muslims. One person felt that war is wrong and that a pacifistic approach would be more successful. To engage in war was to become like your enemy, and to retain our humanity we must be pacifists.
This person cited Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Jesus as examples of successful pacifists. I agree that pacifism is preferable to war in instances where it is logical to follow that path. In other words, it has to work.
In the case of Gandhi, it worked because he was fighting a country that had moral lines that they would not cross. He wore the British down. They would never have gathered up their enemies and gleefully beheaded them with dull knives. That would have been contrary to what a civilized nation does to its subjects. So in the case of Gandhi, pacifism worked.
It worked for Martin Luther King because he was in America. Again, America does not believe in the use of dull knives and beheading as a means to an end. In America, among other rights granted in our constitution, people are guaranteed the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It worked for Jesus' followers when society adapted its beliefs to a more Christian outlook. Jesus was a martyr, and it took many years for Christianity to catch on.
Historically, pacifism didn't work to stop Hitler. When he rose to power, Jewish pacifism made it easier for him to round them up. One neighborhood put up a fight, but that was only after they realized what was happening to the other Jews already taken. By then it was too late. Negotiations went on with Hitler for seven years before World War II finally broke out. That gave him seven years to round up the undesirables and deposit them into his death camps. Six million people were murdered. You can kill a lot of people in seven years while negotiating in bad faith. Hitler had his plan and he stuck with it. It did not stop until war broke out, and he was forced to stop.
Let's look at Stalin. Seven million purge victims were put in labor/death camps, on top of the hundreds of thousands who had been slaughtered outright.
Neither Hitler nor Stalin seemed to have much patience with objections from their citizens. Logically I can't see passive resistance as an option to stopping their plans.
So will pacifism work in the case of radical Muslim terrorists ? Well first off, if you have read the Koran, there are many passages advocating the killing of infidels. The Wahhabis whole-heartedly agree with these passages and interpret them to mean all non-believers. In fact, it is the only holy book that I know of that can be interpreted to advocate the killing of non-believers. These fascists hold the power in the Muslim world. The Muslims who disagree are for the most part silent. And can you blame them? The crazy guys have the guns. They believe they have Allah on their side, and will kill Muslims just as easily if they disagree. The Wahhabi fundamentalists also believe in expansionism and have been working to achieve that goal since this crazy sect was first restarted back in the beginning of the 20th century. And it seems to be working.
Radical Muslims have caused the deaths of more than 10 million people in half a century. The count continues to rise. They continue to move into other countries and demand their religious rights. When enough arrive and the local population refuses to convert, they are killed. More than two million Christians have been killed by Wahhabi Muslims in Sudan since 1989. Now African Muslims are being killed by these radicals in the Darfur region. Algeria has a death count of a quarter-million Muslim citizens being killed by Wahhabis. In Spain, protests have been breaking out and rioting has occurred in the streets. In the Philippines, kidnapping and assassinations are occurring more often. There are problems in Chechnya, France, Denmark and Norway. The United States was attacked on 9/11. Radical Muslims are behind all of this. In Palestine, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, money is funneled to support this terrorism. Saddam Hussein, former ruler of Iraq, also gave money to terrorist bombers, and turned a blind eye to terrorists meeting within his borders because promoting unrest in the Middle East allowed him a firmer control of his own corrupt and murderous government.
If you do not convert to their radical form of Islam, then you are an infidel. You can be lied to, and killed without any consequences. When you are not even granted basic civil rights, which we here in America take for granted, how do you expect passive resistance to work?
Pacifism helps radical Muslims, just as it helped Hitler during World War II. Pacifism allows the killing to continue.
Appeasement gets more people killed in the final analysis than strength.
Mahatma Gandhi
You are indeed a nut if you think the West can coexist with Islam...
Of course, you want to define winning as being anything you want to... just like Pelosi...
I define winning as the complete obliteration of the enemy.
Oh, I agree. I just meant that the actions of an individual in resisting evil are on a different order from those of a country, and that even passive resistance is resistance. Our modern peacenik thinks that there's nothing worth resisting.
South Korea would not be free, if Truman believed in pacifism.
34,000 Americans gave their lives so that millions of Koreans could be free. Greater love than this no man has....
The Brits wouldn't kill civilians wholesale. Yes, they had a couple of incidents in India, but genocide wasn't one of them.
Islamists don't have a squeemish turn to them about killing infants, children, women and innocents.
I was a pacifist until I realized that if I saw a suicide bomber at a distance, who was trying to get close to a large group of children, I would feel justified in shooting the bomber before he reached them.
In the same way, nations have the right to protect innocent people.
I think it is really the duty of a nation to protect its people. That is, one of the things that human beings get in exchange for agreeing to accept the laws and government of a ruler or country is that the ruler or country will defend them.
I think our big problem now is that many of us refuse to admit that there is an enemy and that it is attacking us.
I agree that it is a big problem.
But I know that some generally anti-war folks, like my sister, think the Islamo-fascists are a real threat. She also thinks we need to be "perfect" in the way we defend ourselves. (She thinks there should be mistreatment of prisoners; no "collateral damage"; no killing angry Muslims who got that way because we made them that way; etc, etc, etc).
I think she personifies the leftist sentiment about our war on terror.
That is why we keep having to reclaim the same territory over and over and over in Afghanistan and Iraq. We keep hitting the enemy just enough so they'll take a step back, but we never strike them hard enough so they can't get up again.
That's the reason the American public has lost interest in supporting the War on Terror. You can't get a nation behind you in a war effort when all the leadership does is keep fawning over what a "peaceful religion" your enemy follows.
Well, when our own President keeps fawning over the jihadist imams and parroting that Islam is a "religion of peace," it's easy to marginalize anyone who says the Islamists are our enemy.
So, in effect, our own leaders are our enemy's foremost propaganda tool.
Neither do liberals. That's why they support abortion, infanticide and euthanasia.
Both.
BTTT!
Valin - great post. Thanks.
Appeasement in the end gets more innocents killed.
Appeasement gets more and more moderates killed, thus enabling the radicals to flourish unimpeded.
Because "I give up, just please don't hit me in the face" defines their existence?
Pacifism will end the problems with Islam...
...if the Muslims adopt it...
Anything else is doomed to failure.
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