It Is Immoral To Not Resist Aggression
whether in matters personal, political, religious or in statecraft, ... , it matters not, ... , to not resist aggression is to aid and abet the aggressor, and to assure that after your demise at his hands, he will seek the conquest of another. whatever you may feel the worth of the stance to you as a personal matter, by adopting such a stance, you assure the suffering of another: no high blown assertion of morality can escape this essential fact, and to inflict this suffering on another, perhaps less capable of protecting him or herself than you, is immoral, unethical, and unforgivable.
and, it is cowardice.
by not resisting such aggression, to the death if demanded by circumstance or dignity or honor, is to assure that someone else will bear the brunt of your folly, and that you engender your own fate upon the will of another.
i spit in the face of those who blather about ghandi and passive resistance...
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Read the rest, courtesy of Vanderleun.
posted by Concerned American | 5:42 AM
7 Comments:
Great essay, and it's true.
You may only be speaking of those who believe even defensive violence should never be used. I can understand that point of view better. However, I want to make a few distinctions that I think are key.
Not even Gandhi blathered about "passive resistance." He believed in active, but generally non-violent resistance. The two are not the same.
Gandhi was a pretty decent guy. Do you know much about Gandhi from your own reading? You shouldn't get your ideas about him from ideologically lukewarm, mental weathercock Socialists who believe absolutely nothing but what they want to, and what "feels good."
A quote of his: "Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British."
And another: "In this instance of the fire-arms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the native. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed by the Bill on the natives regarding the carrying of fire-arms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there a slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indian?"
Western, some causes are not furthered by violence. But many causes which are furthered by violence are catalyzed by instances of unresisted aggression. One's cause starts to look really bad when one starts wailing on obviously non-violent people. How could the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s have possibly garnered any support if a "bunch of black men with guns" went around shooting the club-swinging, attack-dog-releasing police, justified as they probably were to do so? What you would have gotten would have been a police state. Picture the Watts Riots times a thousand.
The popular anger against the obviously unjust aggressors often accomplishes far more than a "fair battle" could ever accomplish. Violence is a means to an end. It must be used justly, and that means that its use must accomplish the end it is intended to accomplish. Otherwise, it is just violence for the sake of violence.
Violence is not the right tool for every job. Take, for example, the movie "The Patriot," in which the leader of the Green Dragoons points his pistol at Benjamin Martin's family, and asks Benjamin, "Perhaps your family would like a lesson in the rules of war?" Was Benjamin Martin a coward for immediately backing down? Was he a coward for not immediately meeting that aggression with violence? Of course not. He recognized that violence would not further his cause in that instance.
In WWII, Pope Pius XII saved tens of thousands of Jews, all while the Vatican was completely surrounded by the Third Reich's war machine. Should he have risen up, summoned the secret subterranean Vatican Army, 10 million strong, replete with tanks and artillery? If they had tried to take arms against the aggression, Vatican City would have been leveled, as it would have been anyway if the war lasted much longer.
I understand your frustration with those who would stand to the side and not intervene while someone is getting pounded. But it's a counterproductive policy to spit in anyone's face, good or evil.
A man dies just one death. A coward dies many deaths. Agression needs to be stopped at any costs.
See Ya
When the going gets tough, the tough go cyclic.
"How could the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s have possibly garnered any support if a "bunch of black men with guns" went around shooting the club-swinging, attack-dog-releasing police, justified as they probably were to do so?"
Gathered the support of who? The whites? Freedom is not won and "rights" are not granted by begging massa for it. Rights are ripped out of the hand of an oppressor by threat and use of military force. Always. In the Ghandi example, the military force was the sheer overwhelming weight of numbers of Indians vs. British. In the MLK example, google Deacons for Defense.
Re: Passive resistance
In theory it sounds good, in practice it works until one encounters an opponent who has utterly no interest in/time for indulging the antics of philosophical children. @ that point, the choices for the devotee of PR are, IMO, submit to the oppressor in the hope that they'll eventually come around to your way of thinking & let you go, non-violently refuse to co-operate w/ one's oppressor & die en masse to 'prove' the 'moral superiority' of PR, run until one can't run any further, resist violently for as long as one can in the hope that the oppressor will give up/be defeated.
#1 has been historically proven to be an iffy proposition @ best.
#2 has also historically been a self-defeating tactic but as no one's actually used it, its validity's open to question.
#3 is a failure w/ lots of historical evidence against it as a viable tactic as it assumes that the aggressor will A) allow one to flee, B) won't pursue one relentlessly, C) one will be able to keep running indefinitely w/o suffering unsustainable losses, & D) there's a safe place to go to.
#4 is also historically uncertain in that its success relies on A) an accurate, unemotional assessment of one's situation, & B) an accurate, unemotional assessment of the prospects for actual success. It also helps if one can head off the need for eventual violence by effectively removing a nascent oppressor & his/her followers.
As a general rule, however, PR usually results in the enslavement or death of its practitioners if no outside force protects them from the consequences of their own folly. The bad part about rescuing such delusionals is that they, like the devotees of socialism/communism, too often come to believe that said rescue was unnecessary & all that was required for the 'strategy' to work was more time/effort. The worse part about saving PR devotees from reality is that after awhile they militate against their defenders/saviors & attempt (by 'fair' means or foul) to make said 'sheepdogs' into sheep.
Some will learn the hard lessons taught by history &/or experience, others won't, & the tough thing (for some) is what to do about the neo-Aztec 'Valerie Harpers' who make up the 2d group.
Cassandra (of Troy)
friends:
i wrote the essay.
i must say i have enjoyed reading your comments, and just sort of "rummaging through" the website very much.
"brown and serve" and "cassandra" i thought your remarks very interesting, and well taken, though i did not entirely agree with all the points you raised.
i am an old poop. i shoot and hunt, though the hunting is getting cut back because i just am not as "cold hardy" as i used to be, and cannot take the cold.
i am interested in this self defense thing, and i intend to work towards a position that in some instance not only is it moral or permissable to defend one's self, but that in some instances it should be regarded as mandatory to do so. i am handy to a pretty good college near here, and i am going to go corner a philosophy professor and yack that up w/ him or her.
thanks for your kind remarks.
john jay
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