Monday, April 27, 2009

from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals The Stories Behind the News

from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

The Morality of War and the Anti-War Movement

Posted: 26 Apr 2009 11:53 PM PDT

The essence of the left's political grip on three generations has been to distill

completely irrational ideas into short catchy slogans. The slogans take about two
seconds to recite and about five minutes to properly disprove. This intersection

of advertising logic and propaganda has enabled the left to pollute our political

culture with dangerously insipid slogans, many that impact our moral

justification for defending ourselves such as, "We need to be better than them",

"War is never the answer" or that all time classic, "The ends can never justify
the means."

Popularized by Aldous Huxley, whose mix of psychedelic drugs and anti-war

activism showed that he was a man truly ahead of his time, the slogan argues
that all war is wrong. Huxley took this literally boldly addressing large anti-war

rallies in England, not long before Hitler rendered the point moot by

demonstrating that no matter how much one side may not want a war--

sooner or later when confronted by a ruthless enemy it will have a choice

between becoming slaves or fighting a war.

So do the ends justify the means? If we take the negative literally, all force is

immoral. If a burglar ties up and threatens your family, you have no right to

shoot him. After all the ends don't justify the means. To the pacifist, to argue

otherwise puts you in the same category as the goosestepping stormtroopers

who marched into Poland.

As irrational as the pacifist premise that all force, all resistance, all war... is
immoral; it is at the heart of most anti-war arguments. The entire system of

philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, are built on

arguing that all force is immoral... whether in self-defense or out of

resistance to evil.

Of course no nation, no people, could survive for very long on such a

philosophy. But nevertheless the opposition to America, Israel or any other

country acting in defense of itself is based precisely on the argument that

all violence is wrong, whether it is a policeman shooting an armed gunman,

or a Predator drone targeting a terrorist's vehicle or the mastermind of the

9/11 attacks being waterboarded in order to gather intel about Al Queda's

future plans.

But even those who do not go that far in their thinking, nevertheless accept

the original premise, that force is a bad thing. Now that might be true if we all
lived in a non-violent utopia where no one ever harmed anyone else. But we

don't, and aren't likely to anytime soon. That leaves violence as a fundamental

and important tool for both individuals and civilizations.

And here we come to the fundamental breach in the moral wall of the anti-war

left. When Huxley campaigned against war by England, he was making it easier for
Adolf Hitler to conduct war against Poland and Czechoslovakia... and eventually

England as well. When Gandhi counseled England to surrender to Hitler, he was

doing the same exact thing, only more directly.

Tolstoy put it most plainly when he described his philosophy as "Non-Resistance

to Evil through Force". But of course the failure to resist evil in meaningful
ways perpetuates evil and force as well.

When Gandhi blamed the Jews for asking for help, rather than going to the

gas chambers willingly, in the hopes that this would make the Germans

feel bad about what they were doing... he was putting forward the idea

that people were not only accountable for their own violence, but for how

they react, even passively, to the violence of others. Yet that same

accusation finds its target much more fittingly at Gandhi's own door,

and that of the entire philosophy of the anti-war movement.

By failing to directly resist and prevent

evil by force, they perpetuate a far

greater evil and a far greater force. By

denying that the means of preventing

greater violence sometimes requires

lesser violence... they bring about that

greater violence.

The Anti-War movements remain

fundamentally complicit in causing

many of the very wars they complain

about. Their non-violence causes and

creates violence by preventing the use

of force that would nullify that violence

at a much lesser cost. By failing to make

those distinctions, their ignorance reaps a blood price from their host

societies and from other vulnerable countries as well.

Worse yet it cynically ties the hands of those who might stop the violence,

while giving a green light to those who actually perpetuate the violence.

The left puts forward arguments that delegitimize acts without context

in simplistic slogans to avoid serious discussion of the necessity of those

acts.

The left's moral argument against the War on Terror rested on both

delegitimizing the acts regardless of context as unacceptable, and of the

United States as an immoral entity who was permanently in the wrong.

This same two sided blade approach is routinely used against Israel and in the

domestic policies of many European countries. It argues both against the specific
action and against the moral legitimacy of any First World nation as a colonialist

entity that has no right to exist.

Thus the United States is "wrong" for torturing terrorists, because torture is

always wrong. And it is wrong because United States foreign policy is to blame
for terrorism... not the terrorists themselves.

Similarly the death penalty is wrong because killing is always wrong and

because crime is the product of social conditions and racism created by the
authorities and perpetuated by law-abiding Americans.

In the case of Israel, the same argument is applied as-- Israel's targeting of

terrorists is collective punishment and therefore wrong, and Israel in any
case has no right to exist because it is a colonialist entity.