Enough Gandhi, already!

By Patrick O'Hannigan
web posted October 15, 2001

Are you still angry about what happened September 11? Do you
find yourself annoyed by left-wing cartoonists and misguided
pacifists who see nothing obscene about responding to mass
murder as though it were an unfortunate consequence of bad
foreign policy? Pull up a chair and I'll tell you a secret: anyone
who quotes Gandhi in times like these cannot be trusted.

You know the quote I mean. "An eye for an eye makes the
whole world blind," said the great man. On the pacifist Rolodex,
that pithy diagnosis of the problem with Mosaic Law has gotten
dog-eared with use lately. People mouthing Ghandian wit seem
to confuse nonviolence with WD-40, as though pacifism were an
all-purpose lubricant for global problems. Unfortunately for that
point of view and anyone hostage to it, terrorism makes
Gandhian pacifism suicidal.

Open a history book sometime and you'll find that Gandhi turned
English law and English concepts of justice to his own advantage.
He was able to use nonviolent fasting as an effective strategy for
shaming the British into leaving India. This worked because even
at its height, the British Empire never condoned suicide bombing
or promised instant heaven to people killed fighting for Queen
Victoria.

Not long after Gandhi died, Martin Luther King, Jr. used
nonviolence to energize the civil rights movement in America,
where it succeeded for much the same reason. People
recognized the struggle for civil rights as an appeal to the better
angels of our nature. Had equality before the law not been
consistent with American principle, nonviolent attempts to
achieve it would have failed. Needless to say, neither Gandhi nor
MLK ever faced the Taliban, and yet some fools suggest that
any military response to their fascist brand of Islam makes us
terrorists, too. What bunk.

As anyone who teaches civics would know, the Bill of Rights
does not actually grant rights to American citizens; it only lists
rights that we already have by describing what the government
cannot do. With that in mind, one of the few tasks that the
Constitution actually grants to the federal government is the duty
to protect American citizens.

Given that Osama bin Laden and his ilk have said publicly that
every able-bodied Muslim has a "sacred" duty to kill Americans
and Jews, the Marine Corps is better equipped to protect us
than the Peace Corps. That the U.S government has a long
history of demonizing its opponents doesn't make the Taliban any
less dangerous.

I agree with those who say that we ought to stop sending
American troops all over the world, but as William Saletan and a
few others have implied, blaming America for an attack of the
kind we saw September 11 makes as much sense as blaming a
battered wife for the beatings she gets from her husband.

The pacifists pleading for restraint seem not to realize that no one
in political power has threatened to nuke those countries most
hospitable to terrorists. Democrats and Republicans alike have
taken pains to say that we are at war with terrorism rather than
with Islam. How much more restrained can you get?

Still the peaceniks are with us. Violence only breeds more
violence, they say, forgetting that violence thwarted Hitler and
Hirohito in ways that diplomacy could not. Turn the other cheek,
they say, wondering why Jesus never told the Roman centurion
of gospel fame to resign from the army if he wanted true faith.
The voices of compassion are being drowned out, they say, and
by that they mean that it happens here in this country rather than
there in Pakistan and Iran, where rallies in support of the United
States went largely unreported.

The newspaper that chronicles "pathways to sustainable living
and positive solutions" in my town published a twenty-four page
special supplement jammed with allegedly unpopular
perspectives on the war. Not to be outdone, the head of a group
misnamed Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting complains about
pundits who scream for innocent Arab blood. These views are
commonplace in a local coffee house where anti-war posters
have displaced advertisements for stress reduction and yoga
classes. Meanwhile, the Reuters wire service no longer calls the
men who attacked America "terrorists" for fear of offending
people who call them "freedom fighters." Has no one asked why
views like these get a hearing if this country has as many bigots
as deluded leftists seem to think? Let me be the first to pose the
question.

It is true that the editor of National Review wants to "end Iraq"
as part of this new war on terrorism, but his views and those of
some talk radio callers testify indirectly to the intelligence of the
average American. As they say in Debating 101, a proposition
that everyone agrees with is a proposition for which no argument
is needed.

Neither Osama bin Laden nor I want American troops in Saudi
Arabia, but bin Laden is a multimillionaire related to the Saudi
royal family. If he wanted to be smart about influencing American
foreign policy, he would do what China did and buy his way into
discussions. A team of lobbyists and some full-page ads in major
newspapers would get American troops home faster than killing
almost seven thousand innocent people.

Those who downplay the horror of mass murder because the
United States is not yet the beacon of peace and justice that it
should be are, as one writer says, too philosophical for polite
company. One look at charitable giving per capita and who
provides disaster relief worldwide should convince even cynics
that in spite of its faults, this country already does more than its
share of visualizing world peace. If you really want to know
whether our way of life depends on the suffering of others, the
answer is an emphatic no, and the corollary to that answer is that
armed fanatics are too dangerous to reason with.

Pacifists looking for a role model in their own ranks for these
troubled times would do well to remember Sergeant Alvin York.
Were he alive today, that World War One hero might point out
that Special Forces operatives are now doing as much to keep
the rest of us alive as doctors and firefighters do. Even as we
pray for peace and guard against freedom-grabbing federal
initiatives, we should remember that sometimes Churchill makes
more sense than Gandhi.

Patrick O'Hannigan (plaiddude@hotmail.com) is a technical
writer and self-styled paragraph farmer who writes a monthly
column for New Times in San Luis Obispo, CA. He has also
written for LewRockwell.com.

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