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. It's a desperate excuse required to evade the truth of their own cowardice.

I disagree a little bit. I've always thought of noisily enunciated nonviolence (not the principled kind described in various truly pacifist personal acquaintances), the kind that people like to announce with bullhorns at political gatherings, was always a claim on leadership by moral one-upmanship.

Then there is political nonviolence, on the model of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, which isn't truly pacifist but is instead a form of passive aggression -- and very aggressive at that, since it requires for its operation successfully provoking the very worst in someone else, with attendant bad consequences for other people.

I think of political nonviolence as a kick-your-sister-under-the-table aggressivity, the object of which is to call down external powers on your chump. Nothing pacifistic about it; its intention is to make things worse for everyone, in order to make things better for yourself.

I understand the distinction that you're making here. The pacifism to which I refer is that of the individual who believes that there is nothing worth fighting for. Who would trust their life to a true pacifist? I maintain that true pacifism is morally and philosophically indefensible.

Ghandi isn't a very good reference for the power of non-violent action. He is quoted (though I can only paraphrase) as saying the of all of the tryanical acts perpetrated on a subjugated people that depriving them of arms was the blackest.

That particular quote indicates to me that Ghandi used non-violent means to acheive his ends as more of a recognition of reality and proceeding to work with what he had than the inherent non-violent person that modern thought tends to portray him as.

That is not to say that he wasn't courageous and brilliant. The Indian people had already been disarmed, so armed conflict simply wasn't an option. Ghandi recognized this and managed to sour the British on the idea of an occupied India anyway. If arms had been readily available, I suspect that the history of Indian freedom from British rule might be different.

Knitebane