August 07, 2006
"Peace movements," their track record...
Thomas Sowell, from a good piece on "peace"...
....One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts.
"Peace" movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called "peace" movements -- that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war....(Thanks to PowerLines.)
It is in fact easy to see that peace movements produce more war, and Sowell lays it out. My own suspicion is that it is not just a lack of thinking ability that keeps "peace" movements afloat, but mostly a lack of caring. They exist only to make western leftists feel good, and if some brown-skinned people in distant lands die as a result, nobody in San Francisco is counting.
But the lack of a "systematic way to analyze ideas" is confirmed by my experience. This November I will have been blogging for five years. And I have never once, on political or social issues, had a counter-argument from a leftist that was difficult to answer. Not once.
Pathetic.
Posted by John Weidner at August 7, 2006 06:46 AMOne of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality.
I guess it's worded tightly enough to be accurate, but I would observe that while this is a failing of our educational system, I seriously doubt it's a failing unique to our current educational system. The nonsense folks have always been happy to be suckered into has always been astonishing. Cold, hard global political reality seems best learned through cold, hard experience. The peaceniks and pacifists between the world wars were everywhere - the Greatest Generation didn't figure out what they were up against, and what they needed to do, until they learned the hard way what the alternative really brought you to.
Some folks learn critical thinking in school, but most folks learn it by experience - and as a society, any extended period of relative peace is a period in which experience on the world stage is not gained...
(That sounds more assertive than I intend - I'm just tossing the idea around...please feel free to disembowel it at will!)
No no, I think you are on the right track.
And I suspect the views of the appeasement-movements both of today and the 1930's have less to do with the ability to think, than with a refusal to do so. If you follow certain lines of thought, towards say, the fact that Western Christian democratic civilization is superior to fascism or communism or Islamism, you are confronted with an obvious demand that one sign on with the defenders, even if it means serving in the ranks (literally or metaphorically) with little or no distinction, and little to bolster one's feeling of god-like self-importance....
(Very similar and related to the way that acknowledging the truth of Christ demands submission and service, which is why our self-obsessed society [including me] has found so many ways to wiggle and squirm away from that demand, that one would need something like an encyclopedia to list them all.)
Posted by: John Weidner at August 8, 2006 10:31 AM
