Never, Never, Never
By Cicero | Related entries in Ideas, War
Pondering how centrism can be nurtured in our culture has led me to contrasting Mohandas Gandhi and Winston Churchill. Each man stands out in history as a moral defender of his country and culture, but using opposing methods. Indeed, Churchill and Gandhi were political adversaries during the same era.
Churchill and Gandhi illustrate how being in the right can be wrong if applied inappropriately. Had Hitler’s armies encountered pacifist resistance by the Allies, history would be quite different today, in Nazism’s favor. As it stands, Gandhi advised European Jews to pacifism in 1938. Although it’s doubtful that Jewish behavior during the Holocaust had much to do with Gandhi’s nonviolent principles, their general pacifism in the face of a political cult devoted to their annihilation is tragic. European Jewry might’ve benefitted from having an indomitable leader in Churchill’s mold, had it been possible. Their lesson from grossly misapplied pacifism became Never Again — never again will the Jewish people leave themselves so vulnerable to evil.
Had the Indian nationalists the means to take on the British Empire in a Churchillian military fashion, Indian independence would have been a far bloodier affair for both sides. Despite hysterical claims to the contrary, it is important to recognize that the British were not in India to annihilate the Indians, harsh as their rule was. Gandhi knew that India and Britain had much in common. He wanted post-colonial India to be a partner of the United Kingdom. This, in my opinion, is what made pacifism work for the Indian nationalists, whereas in the face of Nazism, pacifism was crushed by Hitler’s death machinery.
In the current war conservatives generally identify with Churchill’s warring defiance, and liberals emote Gandhi’s pacifism. Yet each man fought a different kind of war. Applying either leader’s methods as a blanket panacea for all conflict would be wrong, and dangerous.
There’s an essay by George Orwell entitled, Reflections On Gandhi, written in 1949 immediately following Gandhi’s death. Mr. Orwell commented on the limits of pacifism in international conflicts, saying:
But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one’s own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practise internationally? Gandhi’s various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?
Orwell’s questions are prescient for pacifists who think the West or America are the primary cause of terrorism. They don’t question our enemies’ sanity, only our own. Indeed, Islamic fascism is considered manageable by negotiation between rational actors who are thought to be seeking reasonable goals. Islamicists seek to restore the Caliphate — the whole world must yield to Islam’s domination. Is that sane?
For all its good intentions, multiculturalism’s weakness is that it doesn’t question anyone’s ideological sanity as it enforces separate-but-equal assimilation of disparate cultures. Today we see the backlash of this policy. Cultures can trust each other only if they adopt a common identity, to forge a shared truth. When different peoples immigrate to the United States, the requirement for citizenship is — or should be — to adopt the ideals and values of the Constitution; they must drop their homeland’s cultural expectations and national allegiances. If all immigrant cultures are equally valid to that of the host country, there’s no viable centrist position to take. Who is sane in a multiculturalist world? No one’s asking, because that would be judging.
Mr Orwell continued:
“Even after [Gandhi] had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not — indeed, since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not — take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. …It is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives,” from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.”
Those who invoke Gandhi’s principles in defense of appeasing Islamic fascists are disingenuous. There are very few in the West who make the Gandhi Argument while living the same ascetic life that he led, which was integral to his pacifism. Gandhi largely avoided deal-making with his enemies. This can hardly be said of many “antiwar” proponents. Western European nations simultaneously invoke words of Gandhian pacifism while living enriched lives. Some of them work to facilitate arms sales to Communist China; France and Russia had lucrative deals with Saddam during the sanctions regime, while UN cronies raked in money from the Oil For Food program. Such hypocrisy goes far beyond pacifism, straight to appeasement.
If tolerating wrongness is right, then wrong will prevail. Donklephant is trying to identify and nurture centrism and find common ground. A robust center should be based on a broad consensus on what defines our society, both in terms of its health and defense. But when we forge consensus, we should be mindful of Orwell’s litmus test. We should ask the question that matters: Who is sane? Answering that question requires judgement.
It’s tempting to believe that we are indeed mad — mad to have evolved to this point of technical prowess capable of killing the world many times over. Perhaps we’re insane to think that the complexity and velocity of our modern life is tenable in the long term. Those doubts come easily. The question of sanity is haunting to consider given the current administration’s efforts in this war. Our energy policy does nothing to reduce our dependence on theocracies; our porous borders have left us vulnerable to terrorists, and possibly nuclear attack. Our amoral commercial culture uncritically pushes us into the economic influence of the world’s largest autocracy, China. Sanity does not gel with these misguided policies — but there still is a vast difference between government incompetence and the homicidal yearnings of a religious death cult. We should easily be able to tell the difference.
Churchill’s stubborn refusal to negotiate with tyrants can be misleading to conservatives too. This isn’t like the last great war; the world is shrinking, which challenges established borders of all kinds. The threat to our civilization is devised around exploiting the open infrastructure of our free society. This war is not a Clauswitzian struggle in the way that World War II was, with tank versus tank. The genius of our technology is shared around the world. It has proliferated so deeply that it isn’t entirely ‘our technology’ anymore. It can be a tremendous force for positive growth by fostering borderless collaboration. And it can also be the insidious means for those who seek our destruction.
Churchill believed that a nation must raise an army to defend justice and liberty. A country must be prepared to win its freedom, again and again. Lives are always at stake, so they should be put on the line. That is the strategy that minimizes tragedy, but never entirely prevents it. We must accept that the world is crippled by insanity, and engage it on those terms, soberly. The porous nature of today’s world is quite distinct from Churchill’s time. Liberty’s barricades are at home and abroad, online and offline. This war is everywhere.
In spite of Churchill’s and Gandhi’s opposing politics, there’s hope to be found in their commonality as stubborn leaders of free people. It can be best summed up by Mr. Churchill’s unyielding speech to the Harrow School on October 29, 1941:
Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
As a culture we tend to be blind to the great qualities of our own civilization, obsessed with past transgressions. Confronting radical ideologies like Islamofascism requires us to believe in our own civilization, in spite of its flaws. We will need to express the power of our culture to others, and why it’s something worth living and dying for. That’s what should be at the center. Western culture can endure only as long as the majority of its citizens promote and have faith in its many ideals, while addressing its imperfections.
A new centrism must establish a refined understanding of our values and morality, who we are as a culture, and what we stand for. Both Churchill and Gandhi stood on solid moral ground. In pursuit of that goal, we must never surrender to the insanity of tyranny. Never, never, never, never.
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July 27th, 2005 at 11:32 am
European Jews during WW II were not pacifists. Their mistake was not recognizing that Nazism was fundamentally different from the persecutions they had suffered for centuries. Despite pogroms from the Tsars and others, they had survived and prospered by not directly confronting persecutors with superior force, who had always eventually lost interest. Their mistake, while tragic, was perfectly understandable.
July 27th, 2005 at 11:47 am
All one has to do is look at what the Islamists want to do with women and gays. Enslave women and execute gays. Simplify it to this essential point (both sexually related, interestingly enough) and one realizes no compromise is possible.
You don’t even have to get into their desire to kill all infidels…
July 27th, 2005 at 12:07 pm
Todd,
Islamists or Islamic extremists? Is there a difference in your mind?
And if not, please explain why.
July 27th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
Justin,
Islamists are by definition Islamic extremists. “Islamist” does not equal “Muslim.”
July 27th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Catching my eye: morning A through Z
Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning: Post title of the day from ¡No Pasarán!: Some liberals appear to be arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable Mover…
July 27th, 2005 at 3:02 pm
To clarify (and expand upon) Michael Totten’s point:
“Muslim” refers to the religious faith. “Islamist” refers to the political ideology that happens to be based upon that faith (as does “Islamic extremist” and a host of other names for the same type of person, including my generally preferred term, “Islamic supremacist”, although for brevity’s sake I’ll stick with “Islamist” here).
One doesn’t have to be an Islamist to be a Muslim - unless, of course, you’re talking to a typical Islamist, who indeed does consider “Islamist” to be synonymous with “Muslim.” In the Islamist view, Muslims who don’t toe the Islamist line, or who act against Islamists, are guilty of apostasy (i.e. rejecting the Islamic faith) and therefore just as eligible to be slaughtered as you or I.
This distinction, I might add, explains a lot of things. For example, when Islamists accuse the U.S. of being at war with Islam in general, they are absolutely right - from their own point of view. To them, the goal of one-world Islamic rule is inseparable from the rest of the religion (and again, the majority of Muslims who don’t believe this mean nothing to the Islamists, except as cannon fodder). Therefore any - and I mean ANY - attempt to resist Islamists’ rise to power, be it in the Middle East, Asia, Europe or America herself - is by definition an act of war against Islam, at least in the Islamists’ own POV - and you can count on them characterizing it as such in their rhetoric.
July 27th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
Wonderful exploration of these crucial topics. Bravo!
Some thoughts inspired by your thoughts.
I don’t think even a Churchill could have saved them. Without military might, and a nation as a refuge and bastion, they were doomed. No other nation would take them in. No other nation would risk its sons to save their lives. Isn’t that the true lesson of the Holocaust? Isn’t that the true reason for Israel?
Gandhian tactics work against essentially moral and democratic regimes. They rely on the ruling power’s ability to feel shame and its desire to be humane. However badly such powers may behave in individual cases, their own inner light always can be touched and it will inspire them to do right. That is his essential belief. That is why he spoke of satyagraha as a weapon of the strong, not of the weak. It’s the tool the loving parent uses on the child who is trying to strike him in a fit of temper.
How truly telling, then, to learn there is a movement to influence the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to adopt the tactics of Gandhi against Israel.
Is anyone proposing this for, say, Dutch secularists in confrontation with Islamist extremists?
[Islamist = political ideology based on a religion, not the religion itself. Not all communists live in communes.]
As for Churchill, yes I turn to him, too, and look to him as a beacon in this current war. But sometimes he scares me. It is too easy to get lost in his swirl of words and forget the ways in which that war was not like this one. Even to the degrees that the two wars are alike, he is not always our best patron saint. Not yet. Not unless things get really bad. Here’s Churchill, after describing the bombing of London:
The time has not yet come for us to apply that attitude.
You write:
I cannot conceive that Hitler was insane. Every decision he made was rational. Sane men can do terrible violence. John Brown was another who often is called a lunatic but was not. The tactics of the Nazis, even when they seem the most irrational, had a sound, but cruel, foundation. In April and May 1945, when anyone could see the war was lost, they kept fighting, and they made sure to fight in the towns and cities of Germany that had not already suffered. They sought to bring down Germany into utter destruction and ruin.
Why? Not because they thought they could turn around and win (though there was some faint hope of a split among the Allies and a negotiated peace with the West), but so that the surviving Germans would live under occupation in conditions of such misery that they would resent the occupiers more than the Nazis, and that a myth of heroic resistance and a Golden Age under Hitler would take root and the Third Reich would rise again in time. [See Stephen G. Fritz's "Endkampf" for a fascinating account of all this.]
And it showed signs of working in 1946 and ‘47. If the German people had not been so utterly worn out by war, and if some Nazis had managed to survive in an unconquered enclave, in the Alps for instance, a real insurgency might have developed. As it is, it’s easy to recognize the same game being played with better success in Iraq. It’s why the insurgents waste firepower on blowing up water plants and electrical substations.
It’s why the U.S. infrastructure building — yes, the work of the dreaded Halliburtons and their contracting cronies — is a front-line battle in this war.
I can endorse that wholeheartedly. It’s an excellent statement of the kind of attitude we need at the center. It requires an element of “joining” and of “preaching” and of “embracing what is flawed” that makes a lot of people uncomfortable — especially Americans, maybe, who tend to value their individualism in part precisely because it allows them to avoid making morally compromising decisions.
As for modern-day pacifists, I was raised among them, among the remnants of William Penn’s Delaware Valley Quakers. I respect them, when they are true to it, and especially when they keep the sense of perspective that Gandhi, in World War II, lost. I think of an anecdote of Leonard Kenworthy, a Quaker activist in Nazi Germany at the breaking of the war.
July 27th, 2005 at 4:08 pm
Hi, just linked to this post.
Michael Reynolds
http://www.mightymiddle.com
July 27th, 2005 at 6:17 pm
Callimachus: John Brown was another who often is called a lunatic but was not.
I don’t know about that. If devotion to a cause (even a very good cause) overrides all notions of common sense and humane restraint, you might call it lunacy. In John Brown it was hard to tell whether the thirst for blood was serving the noble cause, or vice versa.
The same works the other way, too, when devotion to an abstract principle of non-violence amounts to apologism for evil. Lunacy.
July 27th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
John Brown simply attempted to accomplish by violence what eventually Lincoln had to accomplish by violence. He (and Thoreau and a few others) just got there sooner.
In his individual decisions and actions he often was foolish or backwards-thinking or negligent. But he was not crazy.
The essential division here is not crazy vs. sane, but it necessarily invokes that word that makes so many of us shudder: “evil.”
July 27th, 2005 at 7:01 pm
Cicero, the passage from Orwell’s essay that has stuck with me the longest, since I first read it, is the one just before the first passage you quoted. It goes:
July 27th, 2005 at 7:22 pm
#1 Hunter McDaniel
Thanks for your thoughts on European Jewish history. You’re right — their tradition of not directly confronting their persecutors was a reasonable assumption to make with the Nazis. And as Callimachus later commented:
#7 Callimachus
Valid point. That certainly is why there’s an Israel today. The only meaningful response to the Holocaust was Jewish sovereignty. The fact that Israel actually defends itself when it’s supposed to be melting away to the superior wisdom of the ‘world community’ must anger a lot of people. So be it.
Perhaps not yet. I think nuclear terrorism, should it come to pass, will begin a very sad era — not for us nearly as much as the whole of the Muslim world. We may or may not respond by nuking Islamic cities; but I am sure that every possible measure will be taken to remove Islam from inside of the West in response to nuclear attack. Herculean, brutal task.
I understand what you mean, but it misses my point. The ideological grounds of Nazism were insane — building an ‘Aryan Caliphate’, as it were. The foundation of the Nazi ideology was quite unhinged, impractical, and doomed no matter how they were to go about it. The most success they would have achieved would have been their own eventual implosion. Fundamentally, Nazism was a fantasy ideology, and insane. Ditto Islamofascism. Upon such fantasies can be constructed very logical programs to wage war, which is brutal but a practical endeavor. But are Nazis and Islamofascists deluded or not? I say they are, no matter how ingenious their methods.
#11 Callimachus
Yeah, I thought about printing the whole Orwell essay. It was really satisfying to read. I’d almost forgotten how much I love his stuff.
July 27th, 2005 at 8:30 pm
Callimachus: John Brown simply attempted to accomplish by violence what eventually Lincoln had to accomplish by violence.
That’s drawing a false equivalence between the two, both in their means and in their ends.
Today Lincoln is generally considered inferior in abolitionist spirit to John Brown, and it’s fashionable to cast doubt on his motives. But it was Lincoln who struck down slavery, not John Brown - nor could ten thousand John Browns have done it. It was Lincoln who mustered both the will and the means to do so. Acting with violence towards an end that you cannot hope to reach is either immoral or insane.
Their goals were not identical, either. Brown didn’t just want abolition, he wanted vengeance and “expiation in blood”. Lincoln rejected this (as did Winston Churchill). If we took Brown seriously, then we would have expiated the sins of Saudi Arabia in blood long ago, and today we would be dealing out some righteous punishment in the Sudan and elsewhere.
July 27th, 2005 at 8:50 pm
I’m not going to try to make the case that John Brown was in any meaningful way the equal of Abraham Lincoln. Nevertheless, Brown had concluded that the slave had not only a right to be freed, but had a right to equality in this country. He had reached these conclusions at a point when Lincoln was still race-baiting with Stephen Douglas, stating as fact the inferiority of the black man, and suggesting that the best solution to the impossibility of integration, was relocation of slaves to Africa.
July 27th, 2005 at 9:20 pm
A fanatic is not the same as a madman. The question is whether Brown acted rationally or not. He had a plan. It was a lousy plan, but it was a plan. He executed it. It failed.
[Trying desperately to keep this tangent at least in the vicinity of the original post.]
The problem is the means, not the end. Yet, again, John Brown’s personal attempt to spark a slave uprising and a slaughter of whites in the South was something a great many people in the North looked on as a real possibility, and perhaps a heaven-justified one. No, Lincoln wasn’t down that path, particularly, but Stevens, Sumner, Wells, and Henry Wilson likely were.
Just so, Bin Laden thought the invasion of Afghanistan by the U.S. would spark a general uprising throughout the Islamic world, and the overthrow of the corrupt governments. A bad guess, but not a crazy one.
Much of what was said in defense of Oswatomie Brown in 1859 has uncomfortable resonances — for all sides — today. Thoreau, for instance:
He wrote that only those “who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder,” but that such people “will be more shocked by his life than by his death.”
The first victim of Brown’s raid, of course, was Hayward Shepherd, a free black man.
July 28th, 2005 at 5:08 am
[...] Cicero draws lessons from the politics of Churchill and Gandhi (via Winds of Change) Those who invoke Gandhi’s principles in defense of appeasing Islamic fascists are disingenuous. There are very few in the West who make the Gandhi Argument while living the same ascetic life that he led, which was integral to his pacifism. Gandhi largely avoided deal-making with his enemies. This can hardly be said of many “antiwar� proponents. Western European nations simultaneously invoke words of Gandhian pacifism while living enriched lives. Some of them work to facilitate arms sales to Communist China; France and Russia had lucrative deals with Saddam during the sanctions regime, while UN cronies raked in money from the Oil For Food program. Such hypocrisy goes far beyond pacifism, straight to appeasement. [...]
June 8th, 2006 at 11:23 am
Nice and very interesting discussion.
This link also gives some insight in this.
http://www.shahriari.com/poems/4soc/s94.htm
March 14th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
A TIME AND SEASON FOR EVERYTHING
These scions of nonviolent opposition to oppression have been held up as examples we all should follow and imitate in the face of evil the world wide. These successful efforts by good men are called upon as the template that we ought to follow in the f…