Monday, May 26, 2008

QOTD

UPDATE: below

George Orwell from his 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism:
PACIFISM. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough.
MORE:

MaxedOutMama in comments:
[L]ong ago I realized I could not be a pacifist, because it meant spiritually consenting to the Holocaust.
(via MaxedOutMama)

6 comments:

OBloodyHell said...

Nowadays, it appears as though there is no other kind. What a change a half-century brings

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I dunno, OBH. That "humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point" describes most of the pacifists I meet live, as opposed to those I read in the papers. The latter are dangerous leading the former.

MaxedOutMama said...

AVI - long ago I realized I could not be a pacifist, because it meant spiritually consenting to the Holocaust.

To live peacefully and justly, doing no harm, is only possible when there is the rule of just law. And such a rule brings prosperity, and prosperity brings envy, and those who want somehow to take what the peaceful and just have built.

OBloodyHell said...

> "...and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point"

Sticking your head in the sand doesn't make you a pacifist. It makes you an idiot.

;-P

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Hey, watch what you say about idiots.

Point taken, though.

OBloodyHell said...

> Hey, watch what you say about idiots.
> Point taken, though.

AVI, you are an expecially talented idiot. An "idiot tres savant", if you will.

:oP