Pacifism or Passivism?
War is over if
you want it?
I saw this
John Lennon video posted on Facebook the other day and was flabbergasted to
think that people are still proposing that ‘War is over if you want it’, and
are prepared to use this meme to dismiss those who question it.
The YouTube
video is almost identical.
There are two
sides to this question, at least as I perceive it.
Firstly, how
does this work? What I mean by this is
how does wanting war to be over make it happen?
And secondly,
assuming that what John Lennon was proposing was some kind of pacifism, what
are the likely outcomes of such a behaviour.
But we must
address that first question first.
How does it
work? For myself, I can say that I
would like ‘War to be over’, in fact I very much want it. A million people wanted it to not even start
twelve years ago and thronged the streets of London in an effort to prevent it,
but it still went ahead because a small number of people at the top wanted it.
I’m willing to
wager that there are a good many people in the Middle East who would also like
war to be over, I’m sure that they want this much more fervently than I, since
I am not embroiled in a war situation and it is only a notional idea for me,
whereas for those others it is a pressing daily reality.
This reminds
me of a popular version of the ‘Law of Attraction’ which claims that you
attract things by thinking about them.
Well, that is the first stage of the process of manifestation, but if
that is all we do, then I would guess that we are likely to remain in that
situation where the big wigs remain and carry on their wars.
My own
understanding of how to achieve success in the manifestation of one’s desires
is that having thought about them, and decided what you want, then you have to
do whatever might be required to bring about the process of material
realisation.
I don’t really
think this is controversial, it is just the way the material world works.
But what dear
old Johnny Lennon and Yoko Ono seem to be suggesting is that one should simply
not engage in these wars when they are started.
Frankly, I’m
staggered that highly educated people should still be engaging in such ideas
which seem to me to be so unsupported.
I recall
hearing this whole business as a teenager in the early seventies and even then
it was obvious to me that one person, or many, choosing not to engage in
fighting might be all very well, but that if there are those who don’t wish to
participate in that paradigm, and rather prefer to carry on the old ways of
aggression, then you can be as non-violent as you want, but those aggressors
will still carry out that aggression.
As Eowyn said in The Lord of the Rings ‘Those who do not wield a sword
may still die on one.’
Um… isn’t this
obvious?
During the
Second World War pacifists were allowed to register as ‘Conscientious
Objectors’, known colloquially as ‘conchies’, but were required to serve as
non-combatants in the likes of hospital corps and so forth. Clearly it is a wise decision to not have
pacifists on the front line who might lay down their arms and refuse to fight,
as this would endanger their fellows.
But for an
entire nation to refuse to fight would be another thing. The advancing enemy would walk in across the
borders and take control without a shot being fired.
The
extraordinary thing about those who still propose the pacifist response is that
they will say things like ‘it’s never been tried’ or ‘you are stuck in outdated
thinking’. However, I would beg to
differ on this. History is littered
with examples of civilian populations who didn’t resist and were consequently
eliminated.
Attila the
Hun, Genghis Khan and countless others have swept through the open borders of
peasant territories unprotected by lords or empires strong enough to repel the
invaders, and the peasants were put to the sword, their womenfolk raped and
taken into sexual slavery.
Thousands of
Christians who did not resist were murdered by Romans or put to the lions in
the Colosseum. It was some two hundred
and fifty years after Nero first did this to them when Constantine declared
Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. That’s a lot of dead Christians along the
way in between.
Now, if, like
those Christians, you believe that by not resisting you are ensuring your
position in Heaven, or Paradise, then that is all very well for you, but some
might say that this is a selfish position to take as it involves abandoning
your kin, your tribe and culture for your own personal salvation. A similar attitude is present in some
varieties of Buddhism who seek personal ‘enlightenment’, the Buddhist
equivalent of Christian ‘salvation’, while others seek the ‘enlightenment’ of
the whole Universe and all sentient being within it.
The
fundamental point to be made here is that I cannot control the actions of
another. I may want certain things, and
I may believe that performing or not performing certain actions will bring
these things about, but ignoring the possible interference of ‘The Other’ on
the outcomes you seek is to fail to see the whole picture.
This appeared
obvious to me as a teenager and I couldn’t understand why no-one called Lennon
out on this. You lay down your arms and
refuse to fight when the enemy attacks you, and you will be trampled in the
dust. I’m all for non-cooperation
insofar as this might be possible, especially in cases where one’s own side is
engaging in unprovoked aggression, sure, that is fine, but conflict is often
complicated, and to refuse to respond when the aggression is directed against
oneself is simply not survival adaptive.
So far as I
can make out, the only way this could work is if everyone, all at the same
time, decided not to fight. The game
theory model would indicate that a failure of all to participate in
collective pacifism will lead to those who don’t gaining the upper hand, due to
the asymmetry of the situation. These
are very simple, and practical considerations.
[A late
addition. The poster of this video,
Palden Jenkins, who as a young man knew Lennon in Liverpool has detailed in a
reply what I would summarise as ‘confidence building measures’ as the way to
world peace. I have no objection to
most of these measures, they are generally a good thing
> You'd invest as much in diplomacy and broad-spectrum
citizen diplomacy as you invest in military issues, and you would manage
international relations in ways that do not lead to conflict. You would work on
the tone and purpose of the media and education to reduce and eliminate
negative projection on others and nationalist and divisive incitement. You
would highlight the fact that war is no longer economic, except to minority
vested interests, who are themselves no longer economic to the majority.
There's a whole range of measures that can be taken.<
Apart from the
neuro-linguistic association of ‘nationalism’ with ‘incitement’ I have no
problem with this, but it is too simplistic.
Do we really think that those who control the media and the military
industrial complex etc etc etc would engage in this wholeheartedly and
unreservedly? Would there never be
anyone who might try to cheat, or even just create wiggle room to give their
own group some advantage?
I recall the
assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the only Israeli politician that has ever
appeared, to me at least, to have seriously engaged with the possibility of a
genuine and balanced peace and pursued such confidence building measures with
the Palestinians. No sympathetic
backlash against the anti-peace constituency ensued, sweeping the peace
measures through in the way that the IRA bomb which assassinated Airey Neave
helped to cement Margaret Thatcher’s election; rather it seemed to be the
starting signal for a new push for colonisation of Palestinian lands and
pressure on that people. We may see
that that was the day the Oslo accords truly ended.
A tossed
pebble may precipitate an avalanche.
Being nice to people is often not enough. If you don’t show that you have teeth, then your opponent will
press forward. This is nature.
It isn’t the
likes of me, who only seeks to critique the effectiveness of this model, who
are against peace, it is those who covertly seek to undermine co-operation who
do that, those who seek to cause conflict and destroy our societies with crazy
speculative schemes like pacifism, open borders and unrestricted migration into
lands where they have no ancestry or heritage.)
And yet the
advocates of Lennon style pacifism won’t look at the inevitability of people
taking advantage of the passivity or non-resistance of others. All they seem to propose so far as I can
gather is to call names at those who seek to be able to defend themselves and
try to make them feel guilty about taking responsibility for their own self
defence and survival.
It concerns me
greatly that this thought virus is still so present in our society, in fact is
more virulent and present than it ever seems to have been, and so I take the
opportunity here to do my best to contribute to its end. I still like much of John Lennon’s music
(but not Imagine) but I think he should have left politics alone and stuck with
Rock’n’roll.
So, having
failed to understand on examination how pacifism can be an effective means of
establishing or maintaining peace, I turn now to our second question, what will
be its outcome? I can only offer
rhetorical enquiries, the outcome seems so obvious.
Surely this
can only be a concomitant of the first?
How can
non-resistance to the enemy possibly lead to peace? Can it do anything other than ensure victory to the aggressor?
This is the point
at which most pacifists seem to break off, either refusing to engage with the
debate or offering some choice epithet about my moral standing. But I am a serious philosopher and I want
answers, or at least further discussion of the premises and reasoning involved
so that we may get closer to some answers.
I am highly disappointed that people who have graduated from top
universities and even written books are unwilling to take on these points and
respond in some way. The usual refusal
to discuss these most obvious of points seems to indicate some sort of ‘Virtue
Signalling’, that is, that they consider my argument to be beneath them because
they are of a much higher moral standing, and believe in the goodness of all
people so that I am to be implied as somehow unkind, uncharitable, mean and
cynical. Not to be touched. In a world in which they argue that there
are no enemies, those who critique pacifism are made the enemy. Not because of the content of the argument,
which is not addressed, but because of the implied character of the
person. Self defence is seen as
aggression. This is an attitude which
if inculcated and brainwashed into the population sufficiently can remove or at
least negate the natural will to defend territory.
Sun Tzu in his
classic ‘The Art of War’ says that the best victory is one which is fought
without a battle. He also recommends
that the enemy should be demoralised so as to impair their ability to resist.
And this is
exactly what we see with the pacifist agenda, for which I am often amused to
find myself thinking ‘passivist’, if I may coin a neologism.
A pacifist
agenda which is currently rolling out in Europe. The current ‘Migrant Crisis’ which is taking place could not have
developed if the European peoples, or at least the parts of them which hijack
policy, had not succumbed to this agenda and become passive.
It’s an
astonishing sleight of hand and trompe l’oeil.
Peoples who have maintained identities through the turbulence of
hundreds of years of wars have been persuaded that it is wrong to resist ‘The
Other’, that it is wrong to maintain any sort of unique identity, or a border
against strangers, and that we can all look forward to living in a world with
‘no countries and a brotherhood of man’ if only people would stop being so
selfish as to maintain their heritage and identities.
If Sun Tzu’s
recommendations on demoralising the enemy and getting them to surrender without
a fight aren’t being deliberately implemented here, then it is quite a
coincidence I would suggest.
I have heard
it said that all you need to do to achieve this is to get everyone to agree to
it. So simple!
[I think this
may have some shared aetiology with the New Age idea seeded by Ken Carey that
there would be a moment when suddenly everyone would ‘get it’ and we would all
open our hearts to our fellows, and presumably our borders as well, there would
be no more conflict and those who refused this would excarnate because they
resisted the energy wave or something similar.
But no psychological mechanism is ever given as to the manner in which
it might occur. I’m all for wonderful
new things happening, but they need to be within the framework of the possible,
and I have a lot of questions about this which no-one is willing to answer or
even address.]
I recall an
episode of Babylon 5 in which a rogue artificial personality takes over the
computer system and says to Mr Garibaldi ‘Some people are never happy unless
they are screwing it up for everyone else.’ And I have to observe that a truer word was probably never
spoken.
If this Utopian dream of a pacifist world with no
borders were to somehow be implemented, I think even the pacifists realise that
there would be occasions when there would be conflict, however that might be,
but pacifism seems contrary to natural instinct and is not clear about how we
should deal with these things when they occur.. I haven’t managed to pin any of them down on this specifically,
but I can only surmise that the most likely option would be to have some kind
of world government, arbiter or policeman.
We have this
to some extent at present, albeit not quite officially. The UN has appropriated the role of
government and arbiter and the USA and increasingly the EU that of policeman. The mess that this has left of the Middle
East after the last decade and a half kind of discourages me from excused
intervention of this sort, and an ‘official’ World Government would be even
worse.
You just have
to look at the world situation to see that there are blocks with different
interests and policies. No
surprise. The best you can surely hope
for is a balance between these blocks, no one outweighing the others. A unified World Government would have to
level these and that would have to be done with force if any chose to step out
of line.
A World
Government could only be achieved by massive repression and control of those
who did not wish to participate.
It would
involve not being able to participate in actions for your own self defence but
being forced to co-operate with a system which took away your unique
identity. This is all upside down and
looks very much like the kind of thing which Cultural Marxists are aiming for.
However much
the pacifists might argue that we should all submit they cannot get away from
the fact that at some level their plans need to be imposed from above if they
are to be fully implemented. I’m glad
to say that while regrettably the demoralisation of our peoples has taken
place, nonetheless there seems to be a growing tide of energy within the nationalist
and identitarian movements rising from within their hearts to counter that
passivity.
The coming
conflict is inevitable since it is the result of natural law. Passivism has been so effectively
infiltrated into our social values that an invasion of our homelands has been
taking place in slow motion over many years and it is only when that slow
motion has speeded up and the situation has become critical that more than just
the outliers have begun to become aware of the dire situation.
A religion that
claims to be one of peace, but is designed to make war and is called
‘Submission’ has been allowed to invade our lands and is steadily making
headway. The passivity of the pacifists
goes beyond not resisting, but is so swept up in the tide of ‘Submission’ that
they support it, they become the enemy of their own culture. Pacifism is disguised treachery. And treachery arises from cowardice.
Regular
readers of my blogs will know my favourite quote by Krishna from the Baghavad
Gita ‘Whence comes this ignoble cowardice?’
Self defence
is considered bad by the passivists, while it is the actual aggressors to whom
they should be giving their attention.
As is so often the case with ideas that fit the Cultural Marxist mode,
natural law is made upside down and back to front. Passivists aren’t passive when it comes to attacking those who
believe in self defence and natural law, because this only hides the fact that
their entire philosophy is based on projection of their own shadow nature.
They say we
shouldn’t defend ourselves, but they attack us.
They claim
that nations and peoples maintaining strong borders and boundaries are being
aggressive in so doing, while for most of the time these borders act as
defensive and administrative structures.
The international communist nature of pacifism becomes clear at this
stage. Endless and uncontrolled
movements of peoples claiming residence, housing, benefits, health care,
education and so forth in lands where they have no heritage or ancestry amounts
in my eyes to international communism.
It is clearly the antithesis of national identity, which the pacifists
and communists seem to have in common as their enemy, along with the Green
Party who seek as ‘an aspiration’ that borders should become ‘obsolete’ and
that anyone should be able to settle anywhere they like.
And so
Pacifism, or ‘Passivism’ as I now prefer to call it, is no more than a tool of
the crypto-authoritarian left, who would abandon us to the anarchy of
non-resistance in order that they may rescue us with a World Government.
I don’t think
John Lennon really understood this, but rather that this was an idea which he
had had seeded to him somewhere along the line, perhaps the Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi, or one of the many CIA and MK Ultra plants and infiltrators that he was
exposed to over the course of his career.
But he was a high profile and influential person and so even though he
himself was trying to break out of the net that had been placed around him, it
is no surprise that he played into their hands with this one. Probably the most remarkable thing about the
whole affair is that I don’t think I have ever seen a rational critique of the
War is Over if You Want It meme in all the years since it was first made. It has just become an emotional weapon to use
against those of us who live in the world of diverse peoples with different
interests and who recognise that there will be competition and sometimes
conflict between them. This is how
nature works, but we are expected to leave that behind for the promise of
Paradise, whether in this world or the next, even though there is no formal
game plan, no road map, no fall back and certainly no guarantees. It is an argument of mere wish fulfilment
fantasy, not a practical methodology based on known principles of natural
law. It is an example of the Fabian
doctrine of ‘destroying the world to remake it more closely to their desire.’
Personally,
I’d like to see us progress by fine tuning our societies so that they more
fully and harmoniously reflect the laws of nature with interlocking groups who
have shared ancestries and cultures, than attempt to rewrite those laws of
nature according to how a limited human mind thinks they should work in order
to be more moral. Pacifism is a walk
off a cliff.
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