Some Questions for Pacifists

[Boojatta]

1. What should have been done to abolish slavery in the states that belonged to the Confederate States of America?

2. What should have been done to prevent murder in Rwanda?

3. How would police in your country be able to enforce your country's laws if there were no soldiers in your country?

4. If you oppose not just war but any attempt to resolve problems by means of violence, then do you think that police should never wrestle a hammer-wielding suspect to the ground and put handcuffs on the suspect?

[orpupilofnature57]

1. Money, for the first three and Taser for the last.

[IA_Seth]

2. Could you extrapolate on that? Money?

How do you suppose we would have obtained the money that it would have taken to pay off every slave-owner and to stop the slave trade?

Enforcing laws with money? Explain that one for me, and include the source of money.

[China_cat]

7. Show slave owners a way to make more money

without using slaves (machinery, etc) and the slave trade goes the way of the dodo.

[Posteritatis]

24. And that would calm the Interahamwe how, exactly? (nt)

[adwon]

45. Money in Rwanda?

That's a pretty glib answer considering the circumstances. Money would have taken the steam out of the Hutu Power movement? Money would have pacified an irrational hate based upon arbitrary "racial" characteristics applied by the Belgian colonial government?

If money would have done it, we could just buy off the hate of any racist group. We could have dropped a billion dollars instead of bombs on Dresden and everything would be just fine!

You clearly don't understand what happened if you think money is the solution.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. Answers

1. Underground Railroad. Also the changing world economy for cotton and the depletion of the soils in the South would have stopped the large plantations.

2. More attention paid to what is going on in Africa to stop things before they start would be a good policy (btw, the killing there still goes on-check www.refugeesinternational for the latest)

3. Police and soldiers are two different things. In the US, soldiers can only come out if a governor or the president declares martial law. I also don't believe that a war must be started to apprehend criminals. Many people are pacifists in that they are against war.

4. I oppose war, not necessarily what must be done by police to apprehend a suspect who is being violent. I believe the protocols of most police forces instruct officers not to use force as a first resort, but a last resort.

[bryant69]

11. The first argument is nonsensical

It's a common argument of Neo-Confederates, but it's nonsense as witnessed by how crazily they were willing to defend their "way of life" by which they mean owning other human beings.

Let's also note that it was Southerners who fired the first shots in the Civil War; the South was the agressor in the civil war, although 150 years of lying has somewhat obscurred that.

The neoconfederates in the south are like abusive husbands blaming their wives for getting them riled up.

I don't believe you are a neoconfederate - or I'd assume you aren't. I hope you aren't. But this issue always raises my dander so had to say something.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

15. 100% Yankee here

and you're saying operating the Underground Railroad was "neoconferate"?????

As for the land in the South becoming non-productive--that is an historical fact, and one of the reasons people like Jefferson Davis wished to conquer Cuba, among other places. And it is also an historical fact that Britain, one of the main importers of Southern cotton, was developing cotton fields in Egypt-in fact, the high handed Confederates held back their crop of 1860, hoping to blackmail Britain into backing their breakaway attempt.

As for my bona fides-my great great grandfathers and their brothers all fought for the Union. Not one was for the South, not one owned slaves, or agreed with slaveholding. One was invalided for life, the other lost his fortune and died at an early age, a result of PTSD, from what I've read from his pension application papers. An uncle was captured at Petersburg and sent south to Andersonville, where he was cruelly mistreated. Another uncle was wounded in battle in Kentucky; one uncle went mad and was institutionalized the rest of his life. All this was done for the Union. I was raised on these stories, and am a dyed in the wool 100% Yankee.

[bryant69]

16. OK - but it doesn't matter whether owning slaves was profitable or not

The south didn't hold onto slavery for economic reasons - they held onto it for social reasons. They liked the idea of owning slaves and hated the idea of seeing the African American as a legal equal.

[Mythsaje]

4. My longstanding quote on the subject...

"Enforced peace is either slavery or tyranny."

To say that violence is NEVER justified may be noble, but simply wrong. Sometimes it's an evil necessity and I'll never buy into the idea that protecting yourself or those you love, even through violence, is somehow misguided.

Nor do I believe that one should stand by and watch violence done to others without attempting to intervene--first through diplomatic means, perhaps, but, eventually, if no other course of action can stop it--through violent action.

If someone is trying to beat you over the head with a baseball bat, you have three choices. Run away, take the beating, or fight back. If you can't do the first, then the last option is, without a doubt, the only reasonable response.

IMO

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

5. Invalid question.

Even Gandhi agreed it's OK to use force to stop a madman who's running around killing people.

The pacifists were right about Iraq and they've taken a lot of flak for it.

A lot of people owe pacifists an apology.

[Boojatta]

6. You mentioned Gandhi and Iraq. The Original Post didn't.

Suppose Abraham Lincoln had decided, while the Confederate States of America existed, to end the Civil War by negotiation. How would slavery have been abolished in the states that were part of the Confederate States of America?

What criteria do you use to determine whether a question is "valid" or "invalid"?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

8. I'm simply cutting to the chase.

If you're seriously asking about pacifism and slavery and the Civil War, I'm sure there's plenty of Quaker literature you can dig up.

[Boojatta]

9. DU's stellanoir was motivated by the issue of Iraq.

However, I was motivated by a single sentence that stellanoir posted:

Of course I've always been a pacifist and don't think anything is ever resolved through violence.

OMG this truly blows

Perhaps that was simply exaggeration. However, maybe some people (such as Mennonites) say that and mean it.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. I agree with Stellanoir.

I don't think anything was solved through violence.

Violence was the problem of WWII, slavery, etc.

Not the solution.

[Boojatta]

17. Do you oppose the actual enforcement of laws against rape?

The 100,000 Asian "comfort women" enslaved in Japanese military brothels during World War II provide perhaps the ghastliest twentieth-century example. Other postwar courts convicted soldiers of the war crime of enforced prostitution: a Netherlands tribunal in Batavia convicted Japanese military defendants who had enslaved thirty-five Dutch women and girls in comfort stations for war crimes including rape, coercion to prostitution, abduction of women and girls for forced prostitution, and ill- treatment of prisoners. These principles have been reaffirmed in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols.

Source

How would a Netherlands tribunal do anything but take merely symbolic action if no country had used force to resist or fight the Japanese military?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

25. Absolutely.

And to show how much I hate rape, I say we blow up the rapists and their families and their neighbors families.

:eyes:

[Boojatta]

27. Is pacifism simply a response to development in military technology?

And to show how much I hate rape, I say we blow up the rapists and their families and their neighbors families.

Now you seem to be expressing opposition to the military use of explosives in areas from which civilians have not been evacuated. Is that a general argument against military operations? For example, on what basis would you criticize ancient Sparta's military activities?

There may be an attempt to minimize civilians deaths and injuries, but there is no guarantee of complete success.

If you buy an airplane ticket, then you are contributing to the operation of an airline. However, what if hijackers take control of an airplane and deliberately crash it into civilians? If everybody refused to buy airline tickets then that would not happen. If you continue to buy an occasional airline ticket after civilians are killed by hijacked airplanes, then do you accept a share of blame for the fact that civilians are killed in this manner?

[helderheid]

50. dupe

[helderheid]

51. dupe

[Boojatta]

18. The Original Post includes four questions.

Which of those four questions do you believe are correctly classified as "invalid"? Can you provide evidence to support your claim that some or all of those four questions are "invalid"?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

26. All of them.

Especially 3. 3 was just plain stupid.

[uppityperson]

12. answers to 3

Rwanda: send UN in with enough in enough time to stop it rather than just a few to watch it.

Police: are not soldiers so don't need them to enforce laws

You can use force to defend yourself, use the minimal amount needed to protect yourself and contain the violence.

[sarge43]

14. Answer to 3

Check the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 for starters.

Wars are the result of a failure of nerve, courage, imagination or intelligence. I'm no pacifist; armed forces need to exist. However, they must be used only for defense and only as a last resort after every other possible solution has been tried.

[Truthiness Inspector]

36. Can you expand on that?

Specifically re Rwanda and what exactly you would have had the UN do---I'm talking specifics of what they should "do." This directly translates to Sudan and Somalia as well. Aren't we already asking for peace?

Sorry, but this last week is wearing and tearing on me, as I'm sure it is on many here. Peace is ideal, but it is not some magical action-free answer just because we want that to be the case...actions (whatever they may be) must be taken to ensure peace at certain points in time.

[gratuitous]

13. I'll address number 4

There are quite a number of shades of pacificism, and sad to say I'm one of those pacifists who practices restraint against the unreasonably violent. I resolve to try to do better.

The question, however, is a blind. Why is the suspect wielding a hammer? Is he angry? Is he deranged? Is he wielding the hammer against a missile silo in a symbolic protest? Your question is devoid of a lot of context, and giving a fair answer isn't possible.

I attend church with a woman who was a missionary in India for nearly 40 years. She witnessed an ugly incident in a church she attended there. Some of the people in the village were against all Christians, and were convinced that the presence of a church in their village would disrupt and corrupt the society. A gang of ruffians blocked the entrance to the church, and one of the men came in and began punching the pastor. The pastor didn't budge. He didn't raise his hands to defend himself, and didn't do anything to stop the beating. The man threw a few more punches, but unnerved that the pastor wouldn't return violence for his violence, panicked and fled, taking the mob with him. By walking his talk before the mob, the pastor's actions convinced the town better than his words ever could that his church was not a threat to them, and there was no further trouble.

But let's turn some of your questions around:

1. How would initiating a war with the Soviet Union have worked any better against it than the non-violent methods employed by Solidarity in Poland?

2. Would South Africa be better or worse off today if the majority black population had simply wiped out the whites?

3. In your experience, are people more likely to resolve their differences if they're at each other's throats or sitting at a table in a mediated discussion?

4. If you advocate not just the violence of war, but resolution of any conflict through violence, then do you think police should just shoot first and ask questions later? Or at all?

[Boojatta]

20. My questions are for those who oppose absolutely all violent resistance.

1. How would initiating a war with the Soviet Union have worked any better against it than the non-violent methods employed by Solidarity in Poland?

It probably would not have worked better.

2. Would South Africa be better or worse off today if the majority black population had simply wiped out the whites?

It would be worse off.

3. In your experience, are people more likely to resolve their differences if they're at each other's throats or sitting at a table in a mediated discussion?

Neither; they should communicate in writing by means of a neutral third-party. This is why, for example, it is sometimes pointless to attempt to debate with people on internet discussion boards devoted to very controversial topics. If you could find a truly neutral message board devoted to a very controversial topic, then participants would have to either expect a lack of conscientious moderation or pay a lot of money for moderating to be done.

4. If you advocate not just the violence of war, but resolution of any conflict through violence, then do you think police should just shoot first and ask questions later? Or at all?

I don't advocate resolution of all conflicts through violence. I don't advocate war. However, sometimes a country will find itself in a state of war with one or more other countries. Then that country's government must make some difficult choices.

[Boojatta]

28. Maybe a little emphasis on one word will help.

The question, however, is a blind. Why is the suspect wielding a hammer? Is he angry? Is he deranged? Is he wielding the hammer against a missile silo in a symbolic protest? Your question is devoid of a lot of context, and giving a fair answer isn't possible.

4. If you oppose not just war but any attempt to resolve problems by means of violence, then do you think that police should never wrestle a hammer-wielding suspect to the ground and put handcuffs on the suspect?

[prolesunited]

19. By golly, you've convinced me

Violence solves everything. Kill 'em all and hang 'em high! :bounce:

[Boojatta]

21. You wrote "violence solves everything."

Can you quote somebody else who wrote that? Pardon me if I suspect that it is a straw man.

[Boojatta]

22. Kick to elicit more replies and/or comments. e.o.m.

[Blue-Jay]

23. So you're saying that sometimes violence is warranted, right?

Big deal. You want a cookie or something?

I'm not going to answer you stupid push-poll questions but, as a pacifist, let me say that violence is a last resort. Get that in your head, Skippy: a last resort.

So what? dumb thread.

[Boojatta]

29. It's no big deal to you, but apparently it's a big deal to some.

They're not offering me a cookie because they don't want to reward what they consider to be an error.

[Bluerthanblue]

30. If violence is indeed the answer to

most of life's problems-

Why are we still living in such a fucked up world???

We've given violence far more than 'a chance'-

How many times have people used non-violent means as ways to solve conflict???
Honestly now-, no straw-men, no twisted history- the truth.
We have used war, weaponry, revenge, intimidation and threats to 'control' others since the beginning of time- and where are we now really???

Those who made outrageous strides forward in solving, or ameliorating some of societies worst ills- civil rights, human rights, etc, may have been murdered by those who opposed them, but the legacy of the few, still lives on-

Passive resistance isn't going belly up- it isn't 'giving up' it often takes far more courage than wielding a weapon ever does.

There is a difference between doing nothing, and doing the 'best' thing-

And doing the 'best' thing, may not be the most comfortable, or the one that 'feels good for the moment'- Believe me, I know what the momentary satisfaction of hitting back felt like- but I also know the stupidity of keeping the cycle of violence going-

We are circling the drain yet again-
And we opt for the familiar, and the instantly gratifing...

Death is not the worst option- at least in my opinion.

[Boojatta]

32. "Death is not the worst option- at least in my opinion."

Some die while fighting to protect themselves and others. Some die while not fighting. Some die while fighting against undefended, neutral parties.

[hopeisaplace]

46. Well said, perfectly said!

Loved it.

[New Government]

31. You left out

what happens when Hitler came to power and waged war on Europe and the Japanese launched a sneak attack on the United States. True pacifists would say, "Oh.....sorry we've put you to such trouble." Pacifism is unrealistic. (IMO)

[Boojatta]

33. A desire to reach all the way back to 1939-1945 for a good example

might explain the appeal of a "force is never the answer" attitude. After all, there have been plenty of wars since then.

It used to be thought impossible for rocks to fall from the sky, except by those who had actually seen rocks fall from the sky.

If more governments went to war as a last resort, then perhaps this thread would not elicit debate.

P.S. I realize that the Civil War occurred before 1939.

[New Government]

55. That's not really that long ago....n/t

[lonestarnot]

34. 1. Inculcation of equality no matter what color of skin. 2.

Inculcation of equality no matter what tribe. 3. Stupid proposition 4. The problem is not social control, but preemptive strikes w/o just cause, and even worse, preemptive strike based on fucking lies.

[Boojatta]

35. Maybe question number three should have been:

"If all surviving soldiers in your country were foreigners obeying commands from the government of an aggressive neighbor, then what would your country's laws be?"

For example, people who live in Switzerland or Finland might have interesting answers.

How you got from question four to Iraq is a mystery to me.

[lonestarnot]

37. Your question is worse than the others. LOL

We already have Mexican nationals fighting our war of lies in order to receive citizenship, so it's really not all that hypothetical. The question is too broad to answer. I'm posting in 113 degree heat. LOL

[lonestarnot]

38. Take the profit for a few out of war that kills many.

[lonestarnot]

41. In checking the posts again,

"If you oppose not just war but any attempt to resolve problems by means of violence" that's how I got there. Wrestling hammers from a perp is self defense.

[hopeisaplace]

39. Here's what could work, but will never happen.

It may not prevent wars, but it will sure keep them as an absolute last resort.

1. Mandotory EDUCATION for EVERY person on the planet. Mandatory to learn history.
2. Mandatory to learn and understand all cultures.
3. Eradicate poverty.
4. Get rid of the the MASSIVE divide between the haves and the have-nots.
5. Leaders elected & required by GLOBAL LAW to lead while having respect for other countries.
6. A spirit of generosity promoted globally.
7. Global freedom of religion and an absolute separation of church and state in every
country on the planet. <---yah, like that'll ever happen!
8. Each citizen of the planet must donate a percentage of their time annually to the good
of the planet, ie: (environmental work, volunteer work, tutoring the young, teaching their
specialty to others, etc.)

I know, this WILL NEVER happen.

There needs to be a global shift of consciousness, and this won't happen unless
big ideas are tossed out. So there you have some big ideas.

War sucks. Mankind is a really stubborn student. The definition of crazy is doing the
same thing and expecting a different result.

[Bluerthanblue]

42. it won't happen

if people refuse to believe-

The most amazing things have happened, despite the reality that they 'shouldn't have been possible'-

But I have to admit I share your pessimisim.-
And your perspective on what would TRULY change this world- It is a far better alternitive to what we've been 'buying into' since time began.....

Who knows... believing against all odds might be stupidity, or genius-

I like your plan-
and your big ideas-

[hopeisaplace]

44. hey now there's 2 of us...it's a beginning right :)

"believing against all odds might be stupidity, or genius"

I like that, :pals:, :)

[lonestarnot]

47. I nominate your post as post of the day! Very excellent response

to solution of world problems.

[hopeisaplace]

48. oh my goodness, thank you

:pals:

[Bluerthanblue]

49. I agree, and now there's three-

(don't tell they'd banish us you know)

apologies to Emily Dickenson-

It IS an excellent 'master plan'-

[lonestarnot]

53. We could nominate the thread and post a statement as to why?

[hopeisaplace]

54. Let's name the 'Master Plan' - The Global Constitution.

Mandatory signature required by Leaders of every country<---Talk about dreamin'

oh heck, lets add: If they don't sign the Global Constitution, they are not officially
elected/authorized to lead their nation. (Now that's taking it to the max) :)

[lonestarnot]

56. too late damn it!

[lonestarnot]

57. could you copy this and repost under another thread?

The board needs some daylight.

[hopeisaplace]

58. Ok, I'll give it a try...thanks :)

[lonestarnot]

59. Watching for it.

[ComerPerro]

40. We didn't got to war because of slavery

[jerry611]

43. Be careful.... I got flamed for say that several weeks ago

That was a truth no one in here wanted to hear....

[helderheid]

52. Imagine no violence. Truly imagine no violence.