March 06, 2007
The New-Age lobotomized...
Mark Steyn on his recent adventures going on Left-wing talk radio shows...
....I don’t mind the conspiracy guys and the all-about-oil obsessives. I’m cool with the fellows who say, well, America sold Saddam all his weapons anyway: it’s always fun to point out that, according to analysis by the International Peace Research Institute of Stockholm, for the years between 1973 and 2002 the American and British arm sales combined added up to under 2% of Iraq’s armaments – or less than Saddam got from the Brazilians.
That’s all good fun. But what befuddles me are the callers who aren’t foaming and partisan but speak in almost eerily calm voices, like patient kindergarten teachers, and say things like “I find it very offensive that your guest can use language that’s so hierarchical” - i.e., repressive Muslim dictatorships are worse than pluralist western democracies - and “We are confronting violence with violence, when what we need is non-violent conflict resolution that’s binding on all sides” – i.e. …well, i.e. whatever.
Half the time these assertions are such enervated soft-focus blurs of passivity, there’s nothing solid enough to latch on to and respond to. But, when, as they often do, they cite Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, I point out that we’re not always as fortunate to find ourselves up against such relatively benign enemies as British imperial administrators or even American racist rednecks. King and Gandhi’s strategies would not have been effective against fellows who gun down classrooms of Russian schoolchildren, or self-detonate at Muslim weddings in Amman, or behead you live on camera and then release it as a snuff video, or assassinate politicians and as they’re dying fall to the ground and drink their blood off the marble. Come to that, King and Gandhi’s strategies would not have been effective against the prominent British Muslim who in a recent debate at Trinity College, Dublin announced that the Prophet Mohammed’s message to infidels was “I am here to slaughter you all.” Good luck with the binding non-violent conflict resolution there.
And at that point there’s usually a pause and the caller says something like “Well, that’s all the more reason why we need to be even more committed to non-violence.” Or as a lady called Kay put it: “We have a lot of work to do then so that some day a long way down the road they won’t want to slaughter us.”...
I've encountered them too. "eerily calm voices, like patient kindergarten teachers..." Yeah. I much prefer being called a Rethuglican fascist insect who ought to be spit on. The woo woo calm of the New-Age lobotomized is utterly creepy and depressing. I remember arguing with an acquaintance after 9/11, and saying, "This is deadly serious. We've got to fight! Your children are flying around on airplanes. Don't you care?" The answer was calm and unmoved, something like, "I've achieved peace through [insert swami or cult or Gandhi-malarky, I forget which] meditation."
Posted by John Weidner at March 6, 2007 06:03 PM
The dreamy ones claim they are anti-war as if the rest of us are blood-crazed warmongers.
The real difference is that we are willing to look at human nature and the real world, evaluate trends, weigh consequences, and make difficult decisions.
We don't romanticize violence. We recognize that there are people out there who hate us and who want to kill us and destroy our way of life. Sometimes, in self-defense, violence will be necessary; preferably, we can catalyze change in our enemies so that violence is unnecessary.
That requires a willingness to make moral and philosophical choices. Mistakes are inevitable. We need all the intellectual resources we can muster. The one thing we can't use is wishful thinking, and that's all they have to offer..
That requires a willingness to make moral and philosophical choices.I am more convinced all the time that that is the key, that this self-lobotomization is done precisely to avoid ever having to make a moral / philosophical choice. Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at March 6, 2007 09:27 PM
Amen, brothers.
Posted by: John Weidner at March 6, 2007 10:55 PMHey, John-
This reminds me of the perverted characters portrayed in "That Hideous Strength" - the least of the fictional works of C.S. Lewis. These sorts are the "men without chests" described forensically in his non-fiction work "The Abolition of Man."
-Harold
Gandhi wasnt lacking a chest.
And how about Resist not the evil.
bisaal-
Defending others is not negated by "Resist not the evil." Gandhi sure didn't think so. Think again.
-Harold
When Gandhi called upon Jews to practice peaceful civil disobidience under Nazis (in 1938), was he not simply restating Resist not the evil.
People generally berate Gandhi for that that peaceful methods only worked against British but wouldnt have worked against Nazis.
If Gandhi said that I think he was making a bad mistake. But Gandhi was normally doing the civil disobedience himself. In his own country, with his own people. He was taking real risks.
What disgusts me about our fake pacifists today is that they intend that other people pay the price. They are like someone who hears the neighbor crying for help because he's being stabbed, and replies, "Jesus told us to not resist evil." And then they toddle off to bed congratulating themselves on their moral superiority. And close the window so they won't have to hear the screams.
Posted by: John Weidner at March 8, 2007 10:26 PMThe Christians in Solzenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago went to their deaths without resistence--dont you think they follow Christ more faithfully than those you return violence for violence?
Maybe the trouble is that the most people never followed Resist not the Evil.
And for not following it, the Church finds itself in its present troubles
Posted by: Bisaal at March 9, 2007 08:15 PMOn the other hand, here's a bit from an an article by respected Catholic journalist John L. Allen, about growing hopes for peace between Christians and Moslems in Nigeria.
....Yet this good news comes with a sobering footnote.
While it's true that a rough peace seems to be holding today, and that dialogues between Muslims and Christians are growing, many locals say that dialogue may never have begun if Nigerian Christians hadn't learned to stand up for themselves. That is, they believe the Muslims might never have come to the table if they hadn't been forced to do so by a growing Christian capacity to answer Muslim-initiated violence blow-for-blow.
It's a position endorsed almost unanimously by our Nigerian Catholic hosts, who have repeatedly told me this week that Christians in the country "aren't folding our hands anymore." Much to my surprise, even Imam Isah told me that in the beginning, Christians were seen as largely defenseless, and thus not taken seriously by some Muslims.
The frightening implication seems to be that retaliatory violence on the Christian side may have been necessary to balance the scales.
"Only when we started reacting did the Muslims see a need for dialogue," said Dogo, the general secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria in the north. "They saw our people have resolve, and that's when the decision was made to form a consultative forum of religious leaders."
Posted by: John Weidner at March 9, 2007 09:35 PMOn whom they they retaiate upon?
Innocent or the guilty?
It looks like they were fighting both against those who were actually atacing them, and also targeting the property of Muslim leaders who were condoning the violence while not actually doing it themselves.
As a general rule, retaliation against terrorism can't always discriminate between guilty and innocent. Sometimes you just have to hit the community from which violence is coming. This is clearly not the best option, but is it wrong in principle? I would say no.
But many others would say yes. I can respect that if it is the result of sincerely-held beliefs. Unfortunately, today most advocates of non-violence are just nihilists. They don't have anything they think is worth fighting for. (And you almost always find them in places where they are in fact protected by police and armies. They are guarded day and night by men with guns ready to do violence, and this gives them the freedom to say "I don't believe in violence. I'm oooooh so spiritual and superior to those military rednecks." )
Posted by: John Weidner at March 12, 2007 08:37 AM
