All We Are Saying ....

The Fall of the Rebel Angels: Peter Bruegel the Elder.

Hitler wants peace. His speeches and his interviews on this theme are constructed on an ancient formula: war is incapable of solving a single question, war threatens the extermination of the superior races, war brings the ruin of civilization in its wake. -- Leon Trotsky, 1933.

Xerxes, my regular correspondent, tells of a friend who has lost his faith in God because, “His community were pacifists. They didn’t believe that wars settled anything. But wars kept happening.”

Why did he think God was obliged to conform to his wishes? Did someone tell him God was a pacifist? The Lord God of Hosts?

There is perhaps no ideology more evil than pacifism. An evil man who aggressively does evil, and admits it, is at least brave; bravery is a virtue. Far worse is the person who does evil while pretending it is good. He or she attempts to subvert others to evil, and will condemn and discourage the good.

This describes pacifism.

To be a pacifist in the face of evil is, in legal terms, to aid and abet. The pacifist is as guilty as the perpetrator; he or she is just refusing to take responsibility for it.

Wars never settled anything? To say so is to endorse slavery in the US; it took a war to end it. It is to endorse Hitler’s extermination of the Jews; it took a war to end it. It took a war to achieve American or Irish independence.

Being a pacifist will prevent wars? That is like saying, if only there were more sheep, there would be fewer wolves.

It should go without saying that nobody wants war. Nobody wants to get shot at. Hitler did not want war, and was a vocal pacifist. He would have vastly preferred being able to annex neighbouring lands peacefully, as he had the Saarland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. He could have kept doing so happily forever.

Conversely, if there had been fewer pacifists in other lands, he might have been stopped with much less bloodshed, perhaps with none, when he invaded the Saarland, or Austria.

Pacifism kills. It kills with a knife in the back, and with a fatuous smile on its face.