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Pacifism and War-Thomas Sowell
townhall.com ^ | Sept.24, 2001 | Thomas Sowell

Posted on 09/24/2001 4:44:51 PM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl

Pacifism and War

Thomas Sowell (archive)
September 24, 2001

Although most Americans seem to understand the gravity of the situation that terrorism has put us in -- and the need for some serious military response, even if that means dangers to the lives of us all -- there are still those who insist on posturing, while on the edge of a volcano. In the forefront are college students who demand a "peaceful" response to an act of war. But there are others who are old enough to know better, who are still repeating the pacifist platitudes of the 1930s that contributed so much to bringing on World War II.

A former ambassador from the weak-kneed Carter administration says that we should look at the "root causes" behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We should understand the "alienation" and "sense of grievance" against us by various people in the Middle East.

It is astonishing to see the 1960s phrase "root causes" resurrected at this late date and in this context. It was precisely this kind of thinking, which sought the "root causes of crime" during that decade, creating soft policies toward criminals, which led to skyrocketing crime rates. Moreover, these soaring crime rates came right after a period when crime rates were lower than they had been in decades.

On the international scene, trying to assuage aggressors' feelings and look at the world from their point of view has had an even more catastrophic track record. A typical sample of this kind of thinking can be found in a speech to the British Parliament by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938: "It has always seemed to me that in dealing with foreign countries we do not give ourselves a chance of success unless we try to understand their mentality, which is not always the same as our own, and it really is astonishing to contemplate how the identically same facts are regarded from two different angles."

Like our former ambassador from the Carter era, Chamberlain sought to "remove the causes of strife or war." He wanted "a general settlement of the grievances of the world without war." In other words, the British prime minister approached Hitler with the attitude of someone negotiating a labor contract, where each side gives a little and everything gets worked out in the end. What Chamberlain did not understand was that all his concessions simply led to new demands from Hitler -- and contempt for him by Hitler.

What Winston Churchill understood at the time, and Chamberlain did not, was that Hitler was driven by what Churchill called "currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them." That was also what drove the men who drove the planes into the World Trade Center.

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. In Britain during the 1930s, Labor Party members of Parliament voted repeatedly against military spending, while Hitler built up the most powerful military machine in Europe. Students at leading British universities signed pledges to refuse to fight in the event of war.

All of this encouraged the Nazis and the Japanese toward war against countries that they knew had greater military potential than their own. Military potential only counts when there is the will to develop it and use it, and the fortitude to continue with a bloody war when it comes. This is what they did not believe the West had. And it was Western pacifists who led them to that belief.

Then as now, pacifism was a "statement" about one's ideals that paid little attention to actual consequences. At a Labor Party rally where Britain was being urged to disarm "as an example to others," economist Roy Harrod asked one of the pacifists: "You think our example will cause Hitler and Mussolini to disarm?"

The reply was: "Oh, Roy, have you lost all your idealism?" In other words, the issue was about making a "statement" -- that is, posturing on the edge of a volcano, with World War II threatening to erupt at any time. When disarmament advocate George Bernard Shaw was asked what Britons should do if the Nazis crossed the channel into Britain, the playwright replied, "Welcome them as tourists."

What a shame our schools and college neglect history, which could save us from continuing to repeat the idiocies of the past, which are even more dangerous now in a nuclear age.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
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1 posted on 09/24/2001 4:44:51 PM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl
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To: Ragtime Cowgirl
Bump
2 posted on 09/24/2001 4:49:11 PM PDT by Lucky2
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To: Lucky2
Bump
3 posted on 09/24/2001 4:53:20 PM PDT by Abn1508
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To: Ragtime Cowgirl
Thomas Sowell is my indispensable teacher. Read "Vision of the Anointed" and his many other great explorations of class and race politics.
4 posted on 09/24/2001 4:53:53 PM PDT by Havisham
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To: Ragtime Cowgirl
Pacifists are among the most immoral of men. They make no distinction between agression and defense. Therefore, pacifism is one of the greatest allies an agressor can have.
5 posted on 09/24/2001 4:53:58 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: Ragtime Cowgirl
What you do go to the root cause. Bring it in to the light for all to see. Then you rip its throat out.

I just as soon to live with a cobra snake in my yard as hav the Al Queda lurking about. Where I come from we'd get a hoe chop its head off.

6 posted on 09/24/2001 4:58:07 PM PDT by oyez
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To: Ragtime Cowgirl
excellent
7 posted on 09/24/2001 4:58:57 PM PDT by breakem
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To: Ragtime Cowgirl
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. In Britain during the 1930s, Labor Party members of Parliament voted repeatedly against military spending, while Hitler built up the most powerful military machine in Europe. Students at leading British universities signed pledges to refuse to fight in the event of war.

Remember the Star Trek: TOS episode with Joan Collins. She played the pacifist, Edith Keeler. Gist of the episode, is that a rabid Dr. McCoy travels back into the past through an alien artifact, and changes history. Capt Kirk and Mr. Spock have to go back and repair the damage that Dr. McCoy caused to time. Edith Keeler was the pacifist who will start and effective pacifist movement that will delay the United States' entrace into World War II, thus allowing Hitler's Germany to develop the atomic bomb first and conquer the planet.

Link

8 posted on 09/24/2001 5:07:12 PM PDT by Frohickey
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To: Ragtime Cowgirl
Thanks for a wonderful post. He is a very, very good writer.
9 posted on 09/24/2001 5:12:34 PM PDT by proud American in Canada
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Comment #10 Removed by Moderator

Comment #11 Removed by Moderator

To: Ragtime Cowgirl
I love Thomas Sowell. Thanks for posting this.
12 posted on 09/24/2001 5:48:21 PM PDT by Sandy
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To: Havisham
And Jesse Jackson? What this attack calls for is a massive redistribution of American wealth.
From Jesse Jackson and Janet Reno: Where's the press now?

A Tale of Two Preachers

By Kenneth R. Timmerman in Chicago
ktimmerman@InsightMag.com

Though Louis Farrakhan expressed sorrow at America’s tragedy, Jesse Jackson tried to transform a moment of national mourning into the tattered politics of race war.

Jesse Jackson blasted America’s leaders and blamed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on American arrogance in a weekly meeting at Operation PUSH headquarters in Chicago on Sept. 15. In separate appearances in the city during the week, Jackson and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan called on President George W. Bush to change U.S. policies they claim created anti-American hatred in the Middle East.

Outside Operation PUSH headquarters on South Drexel Avenue was a van from the Red Cross, and the cavernous hall was packed. Up on stage, Jackson was calling upon people to give blood. But rather than send them outside to the Red Cross van, he asked them to fill out an Operation PUSH recruitment card, promising that if blood were needed his group would give them a call.

Jackson had been seated next to a longtime PUSH activist, the Rev. Willie Barrow, and to Muslim clerics. The choir was singing, the organ was playing and a gospel band was warming up. Behind him, when he began to preach, was a bigger-than-life photo of Martin Luther King Jr. There were many white faces in the crowd, but they were not those of Jackson’s left-wing political friends. These were working-class faces — tough, grizzled faces — men and women with rough hands and thick necks. On their laps they carried banners for Local 15 of the IBEW, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, each with an American flag. These workers, and a few isolated patriots here and there in the large audience, were the only ones carrying the flag — and they apparently didn’t know they were offending since they never before had been invited into Jackson’s inner sanctum. Up on Jackson’s stage there were no flags, no red-white-and-blue ribbons, no sign of mourning or of rallying to America.

“It is not fair to stereotype Arabs and Muslim Americans,” Jackson declaimed, blasting the administration for having allegedly singled out Muslims in the wake of the attacks. “Hitler stereotyped the Jewish people. Hitler did racial profiling of the Jewish people and it was wrong. In Oklahoma City, they thought it must be Arabs. They thought it was the Middle East, but it was the Middle West. They said black kids had all these guns and drugs, that they did crack cocaine. They said we’d be a lot safer if we just locked up all them black kids. Then Columbine came. … So we know that stereotyping people for their race and religion is wrong.”

Jackson introduced Ahmed Umar Abdallah of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago with an indictment aimed squarely at Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had asked for tougher laws to fight terrorists. “We say to our Muslim brothers: We share your pain. It was you today, but before sundown it’s the rest of us. … Now a police state is closing in [with] the suspension of civil liberties.”

The soft-spoken Abdallah, with his white hair and well-pressed suit, appeared to agree. In just four days, he noted, there had been 217 “documented cases of anti-Muslim violence and hate crimes.” But instead of blaming Republicans, he denounced those who had carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. “Terrorism has no denomination,” he said. “Terrorists have no religion. Terrorists have agendas — and we categorically reject their agenda. Islam regards terrorism as a cowardly and predatory act against God and man.”

Fellow cleric Azhar Usman offered Koranic prayers and joined in condemning the terrorists. “What makes this tragedy so despicable is that people commit these atrocities in the name of God. As a Muslim, I say to you: Any human being who can support these attacks has lost their humanity.” There are an estimated 350,000 Muslims in the greater Chicago area.

But Jackson had no such words of condemnation. Instead, he focused on a political target: “Colin Powell, we are told, was talking about multilateralism and reaching out to others. The next thing we know, Time magazine reports that he has been pushed to the side. … Man could build some bridges, cure some sick, feed some children. Man could make some friends.”

Instead of deploying U.S. troops to root out the organizations that carried out the attacks and strike the countries that support them, Jackson said, the United States should “launch the fight for the redistribution of resources. One hundred million people will have AIDS in five years. We should use our strength for that.”

Jackson repeated a fabrication about the Arab-Afghans surrounding Osama bin Laden, as if it were a well-known truth. “We say we’re going to bomb the places where they got their training. But they got their training from us.” In fact, as the director of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence told this reporter three years ago in Afghanistan on bin Laden’s footsteps, bin Laden and his followers never received training with the Afghan mujahideen during the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, but grafted themselves onto the radical Abu Sayyaf group like a band of wandering war groupies.

Neither Jackson’s house in Chicago, nor that of his son Jesse Jr., a Democratic congressman from Chicago, displayed a flag in front or from the windows. The house of another son, Jonathan, who runs a beer distributorship in Chicago, similarly was unadorned.

The Rev. Charles Jenkins, pastor at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church where Jackson is a member, was surprised when he learned of Jackson’s message about American arrogance. “We had a conference call on Wednesday with 50 pastors, and Reverend Jackson was on the line,” he tells Insight. “Our message was one of mourning, one of unity and no scapegoating. President Bush called on us for support, saying we cannot defend ourselves if we are fighting each other. So let this unite us as a people and help us turn to God and the church.” This was not, however, Jackson’s message.

After the public meeting at Operation PUSH headquarters, Jackson invited reporters into a security-tight back room for closer questioning. He claimed that several members of his organization had perished in the blast but soon corrected himself when asked by Insight to name them. “They weren’t actually our staff members,” he said. “Our staff is here and in Washington, in other buildings. But our International Trade group members — for two years of the Wall Street project we were on the top floor of the Trade Center so we frequented that building. We knew a lot of people who worked there.” (see link for rest of article)

13 posted on 09/24/2001 5:49:16 PM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl
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To: Northman
It was largely because of them that we were woefully unprepared for the war.

Care to elaborate? Then we can discuss the Clinton revised immigration policies, the transference of technology oversight from Defense to Commerce, the gutting of our military and careless widespread use of our forces, the money spent on trips, reports, committees, speeches, web pages showing that the Clinton administration knew the extent of the terrorist threat and did very little, the airline money flowing to the DNC after Gore told them they needed to upgrade security, then dropped the request, Madeline Albright and Lee Feinstein pushing Afghanis for women's rights and gun control and assembling a coalition of busybodies that annoyed former allies and endangered American ties....

14 posted on 09/24/2001 5:56:20 PM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl
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To: Ragtime Cowgirl
Thanks for posting a GREAT article. And as this tragedy has caused a line in the sand to be drawn, thanks for posting the article that shows J. Jackson as not supporting the US. Sometimes it takes adversity to see what some folks are really like. Of course, in Jackson's case, most Freeper's know what he is like and have known for years...
15 posted on 09/24/2001 5:58:42 PM PDT by Fury
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To: Northman
Jesus was NOT a pacifist and he even wasn't against capital punishment, though he suffered it himself. Jewish law requires self-defense and defense to protect one's own life and others lives. It's the law. This is hardly compatible with pacifism.
16 posted on 09/24/2001 6:07:31 PM PDT by Kermit
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To: Fury
You're very welcome.

Janet Reno's protesting with other female Dem. Senators, etc., in DC right now. The press is silent (probably joining hands). Thank god for FR and e-mail.(^:

17 posted on 09/24/2001 6:18:08 PM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl
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To: Northman
Jesus was immoral?

I suppose you felt oh-so-smug-and-righteous posting that. What in the world is the point you are making? That we should just sit on our hands and let ourselves get killed, like good little Christians? You think Jesus would want that outcome? I don't, but if that's your view, then you are one of the immoral pacifists I was talking about.

18 posted on 09/24/2001 6:44:29 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
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To: Ragtime Cowgirl
I watched Robert Jensen on O'Reilly earlier tonight. He would feel comfortable in Chamberlain's clothes.
19 posted on 09/24/2001 6:53:00 PM PDT by PogySailor
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To: Ragtime Cowgirl
We should understand the "alienation" and "sense of grievance" against us by various people in the Middle East.

Maybe it's time for people in the Middle East understand our grievance for the 6500+ victims. Now it's payback time.

20 posted on 09/24/2001 6:58:25 PM PDT by TerryInRiverside
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