| I considered myself a pacifist for a few years, roughly from my junior year in high school to my junior year in college. (Jacob has no idea how trite a lot of what he says sounds to me. He imagines I have never heard it, or thought it, before.) I finally saw starkly that it was foolish to think that those predisposed to brutality, like Nazis, would be in the long run affected by civil disobedience and the superior example; that Gandhi was lucky he had the British, and MLK was fortunate to have Americans, who were largely not brutal, and had consciences that would be pricked; and violence really, in many situations, does solve things wonderfully well. I finally could not cede the field to those who didn't mind bullying everyone else in order to keep my own hands clean, that was just a recipe for hell on earth. Once the Nazis had shown that an apparently civilized group of people was capable of the wildest evil, of trying to exterminate whole peoples systematically, who knows what the malicious might contrive and promote unless held in check? |
