Young Douglas is a naughty boy. And a condescending one as well.
So I've decided to stop feeding him traffic on his blog and to drag him, kicking and screaming if necessary, over to this blog if he wants to continue with his ill-informed put-downs of pacifism meretriciously masquerading as genuine debate.
Here on my blog I feel much freer to bitchslap the little pinko commie bastard when he misbehaves. He does, after all, advocate violence, so he ought to be enjoying this... ;-)
To save you a trip over to his blog, I'll now deconstruct
his latest feeble effort over here. Ready? OK, here goes...
He holds up
the death of Rachel Corrie as evidence of a "fundamental flaw" in pacifism. He suggests by this that if pacifists get killed there is a flaw in pacifism. He couldn't be more wrong. I have no idea where he got such a distorted view of what pacifism is all about. In fact, I would argue that by killing Corrie, the Israeli regime lost a huge amount of support from the rest of the world and that her death brought a huge amount of damaging attention upon what the Israeli occupation was/is really doing. I assert that it did huge damage to the Israeli cause. Much more so than any suicide bomber's cowardly attack on innocent Israeli civilians.
I would argue, that whilst Corrie's death was most tragic and regrettable, it was by no means in vain. By killing Corrie, the IDF discredited itself and the Israeli cause immensely, and brought a huge mountain of negative publicity upon itself. Whereas, every suicide bomber actually strengthens the Israelis' cause and their determination to fight, as well as winning them sympathy from some misguided quarters. Therefore, if anything, Corrie's death was a hundred times more effective and damaging to Israel than a suicide bomber's attack.
One of the strongest weapons of pacifism is that of public opinion. The more pacifists get killed or mistreated, the more the tide of public opinion swings away from the oppressors/aggressors and towards the pacifists' resistance.
Conversely, armed struggle provides the oppressor with justification for violent retaliation and the means to demonise the members of the resistance. It is counterproductive in the sense that it gets huge numbers of people killed before a "victory" is achieved.
Here's a little thought experiment: The armed resistance against American aggression in Vietnam cost the Vietnamese people 3,000,000 (that's three million) dead bodies. In America (and Australia) the propaganda surrounding the deaths of our own soldiers convinced our people long enough for this terrible death toll to be exacted upon the Vietnamese (and Cambodians, and Laotians).
However (and this is the thought experiment) if the Vietnamese resistance had been kept totally pacifist, i.e. human masses of peaceful protestors gridlocking the places where the Americans tried to go, surrounding American bases with peaceful protestors; and if those protestors did not in any way harm the Americans, and if all they did was to refuse to budge and just keep up the chant
"Yankee Go Home !!!" day after day, week after week, what could the Americans have done, and how soon would they have had to do it?
Sure, they could fire into the crowds. They could kill hundreds, maybe thousands. But as the world found out about it, and they would have, global outrage at such a monstrous injustice would have forced the Yanks to piss off within months (not ten years as it was with the war) and if (let's say) the number of innocent, peaceful protestors murdered by the Americans had gotten as high as 30,000 (and such a figure would have constituted a Human Rights attrocity of such proportions that America would have been promptly and successfully prosecuted in The Hague) this number would still have been only 1/100th of the number of Vietnamese killed by the Americans in that war.
So, I wonder if Douglas can tell me why he thinks armed struggle (war) is better than nonviolent resistance (peace).
One way, you instantly and demonstrably turn the aggressor into a murdering monster, whereas the other way, the aggressor can justify their violence.
One way, some people will get murdered, whereas the other way many many more times that number will surely die.
One way, the aggression cannot be maintained for very long (usually only months), whereas the other way the conflict can, and generally does, go on for many years.
I argue that Douglas has not yet even begun to grasp the devastating effect that properly planned and executed peaceful people power can have.
He certainly has
not (all of his obfuscations aside) demonstrated any fundamental flaw in pacifism at all...
Ironically and, dare I say, disingenuously, he expresses anger at Corrie's death, yet he would apparently gladly recruit, motivate, train, arm, and dispatch thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of politcal killers (whom he would call "freedom fighters" to die for his questionable "cause" and thereby also subject the civilian population to a vastly protracted period in which millions would be "collaterally" killed by both sides. Can you see the inconsistency in his rhetoric yet?
