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…

[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 was like the best of those who stood at Concord Bridge once, on Lexington Common, and on Bunker Hill, only he was firmer and higher-principled than any that I have chanced to hear of as there. … They could bravely face their country’s foes, but he had the courage to face his country herself when she was in the wrong.

… We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, are not represented!

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.”

I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer the philanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me. … I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. …

I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharp’s rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharp’s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.

The first victim of Brown’s raid, of course, was Hayward Shepherd, a free black man.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

We live in a terrible epoch of the human story, but we believe there is a broad and sure justice running through its theme. It is time that the enemy should be made to suffer in their own homelands something of the torment they have let loose upon their neighbours and upon the world. We believe it to be in our power to keep this process going, on a steadily rising tide, month after month, year after year, until they are either extirpated by us or, better still, torn to pieces by their own people.

The time has not yet come for us to apply that attitude.

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 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.

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.

At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world,” which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference.

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.”

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.

Some thoughts inspired by your thoughts.

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.

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.

In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered, in the earliest stages, that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For, what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of Truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but one’s own self.

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.

One of the last foreigners to visit Yasser Arafat before he fell ill was Arun Gandhi, grandson of Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi. He traveled to Arafat’s compound in Ramallah with a simple message: Put down the gun and adopt Gandhi’s way of nonviolent resistance.

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:

We ask no favours of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight our people were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, “No, we will mete out to them the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us.” The people with one voice would say: “You have committed every crime under the sun. Where you have been the least resisted there you have been the most brutal. It was you who began the indiscriminate bombing. We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst – and we will do our best.” Perhaps it may be our turn soon; perhaps it may be our turn now.

We live in a terrible epoch of the human story, but we believe there is a broad and sure justice running through its theme. It is time that the enemy should be made to suffer in their own homelands something of the torment they have let loose upon their neighbours and upon the world. We believe it to be in our power to keep this process going, on a steadily rising tide, month after month, year after year, until they are either extirpated by us or, better still, torn to pieces by their own people.

The time has not yet come for us to apply that attitude.

You write:

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?

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.

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.

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.

Often, on his way to visit the U.S. embassy for recent news, Kenworthy would find himself whistling “the very catchy tune of Wenn wir fahren, wenn wir fahren, wenn wir fahren nach Engel-land, a favorite tune of the German radio broadcasts about traveling to Angel-land, a play on the world England.� Realizing this unintentional, implicit support for the war, this Quaker pacifist quickly switched to whistling God Bless America and got a “perverted sense of satisfaction from that defiant act.�

“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.

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…

Islamists are by definition Islamic extremists. “Islamist” does not equal “Muslim.”

Islamists or Islamic extremists? Is there a difference in your mind?

And if not, please explain why.

You don’t even have to get into their desire to kill all infidels…