On the Repressed Violence of the Nonviolent

Didn't get much sleep last night. The boy spiked a 104 degree fever right before bedtime, so it took awhile to get it down, then we were up again at 3:00AM. Now it's 6:30, and I'm guessing he'll be up any minute.

Which reminds me of a bizarre development that occurred a couple of weeks ago, that I've been meaning to write about. That is, the mother of Tristan's best friend broke up with us (I know, it sounds like a Seinfeld episode) when she learned of Mrs. G's plans to write a children's book in praise of Modern Military Heroes. She abruptly cut off all relations, because she doesn't want her son to have any knowledge of, or contact with, things military. Not only does she not allow him to play with evil things like toy guns, she would never even allow him to wear so much as a camouflage t-shirt. She is horrified at the thought that he might become aggressive. Which of course anyone can see that he already is, being that he is a human being in general and a boy in particular.

I'm a boy, I'm a boy, but my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, but when I say I am, I get it --Pete Townshend

This fear of aggression is an interesting projection. Based on what I can tell of her, she is troubled by unconscious aggression that she cannot express, so it comes out as an aggressive fear of aggression. This is a common pattern among "pacifist" leftists, who are always so passive-aggressively obnoxious. To imagine that you can simply eliminate aggression and violence from the human repertoire is pure fancy. In any event, you wouldn't want to eliminate them even if you could, any more than you'd want to dismantle the immune system because of the violent manner in which it deals with bacterial intruders. What are we supposed to do, love viral invaders into submission?

I didn't get all of the details of the conversation, in part because Leslie was so stunned that she didn't remember all of it. But one thing the friend -- who is thoroughly secular and irreligious -- asked was "how can you be so spiritual and pro-military?" I think Leslie was so taken aback by the question that she hardly knew how to respond. She's not very confrontational most of the month, but of course the only appropriate answer is, "how can you be spiritual and not be pro-military, dumbass."

Naturally, it all depends upon which military you're talking about. The moral retardation of so many leftists just astonishes me. And it is literally retardation, for just as one may be mentally retarded but a decent person, one may be intellectually brilliant but a moral imbecile, as so many leftist professors prove (not that they're so brilliant, either). Violence is good or bad, depending entirely upon the uses to which it is put.

Which gives rise to an immediate corollary that even many religious people don't appreciate: that love can be good or bad, depending upon the use to which it is put -- or, to be more precise, the object to which the love is directed. For just as there is profoundly moral violence, there is profoundly immoral love, for example, the kind of corrupt and immoral love expressed by one of the most overrated human beings of all time, Mohandas Gandhi. Just as knowledge that knows falsehood is not really knowledge, love that improperly loves evil (for there are properly severe ways to love the evildoer) is a kind of hatred.

Regarding Gandhi's immoral pacifist-aggression, Richard Grenier notes that he wrote to Hitler and attempted to convert him to the ways of nonviolence. "'Dear Friend,' the letter begins, and proceeds to a heartfelt appeal to the Fuhrer to embrace all mankind 'irrespective of race, color, or creed.'" Gandhi naively thought that "Hitler's heart would be melted by an appeal to forget race, color, and creed, and... was sure the feelings of the Japanese would be hurt if they sensed themselves unwanted."

Yes, fighting fascists will only create more fascists! Until we kill all of them.

At a particularly dark time of the war, "when Germany's panzer divisions turned west, Allied armies collapsed under the ferocious onslaught, and British ships were streaming across the Straits of Dover from Dunkirk, [Gandhi] wrote furiously to the Viceroy of India: 'This manslaughter must be stopped. You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man....'"

In fact, The Great Soul also composed an open letter to the British people, "passionately urging them to surrender and accept whatever fate Hitler' had prepared for them": "Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds."

He also had good advice for the Jews, really no different than today's leftists who compare the fence to keep murderous Palestinian savages out to the wall that kept decent people from escaping communist tyranny:

"All Jews sitting emotionally at the movie 'Gandhi' should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers' knives and throw themselves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for 'ages to come.' If they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave a 'rich heritage to mankind.'" Even after the war, when the unprecedented extent of the massacre became known, Gandhi callously insisted "that the Jews died anyway, didn't they? They might as well have died significantly."

Could Gandhi be as stupid as Jimmy Carter? It's possible.

Meanwhile -- and this is important -- "Gandhi's monstrous behavior to his own family is notorious." You'll have to read the article to find out how, but the point is how similar this is to the rank and foul Hollywood leftist, the kind of person who loves mankind but detests actual human beings. I am quite sure that this is one of the main appeals of radical environmentalism, because it allows the preening, self-absorbed narcissist to imagine he is a morally superior person merely by hectoring other people about their energy usage.

Look at the truly detestable Mark Cuban and Brian de Palma, whose new film smears American troops as rapists and butchers -- as if the actions of a few people are a reflection on the tens of thousands of others. Meanwhile, the same gentle and compassionate leftists will say that we cannot judge the Religion of Peace based upon "a few" people who take the Koran seriously in its persistent directives to murder infidels.

Again, if you naively deny your own aggressive tendencies, they will simply come out in an indirect manner. The angry projection of aggression is utterly palpable on websites such as dailykurse or huffingandpissed. These people deny that we are under attack by violent killers (their favorite candidate says that the war on global jihad is just a "bumper sticker"), but constantly fantasize that they are being attacked by President Bush, which leads to a heightened fear of him, and therefore the need for more violent projection to rid themselves of the irrational fear. This cycle is commonly encountered in clinical practice.

Regarding Gandhi's own denial, Grenier writes that it is not appreciated "how much violence was associated with [his] so-called 'nonviolent' movement from the very beginning." The poet Tagore astutely "sensed a strong current of nihilism in Gandhi almost from his first days, and as early as 1920 wrote of Gandhi's 'fierce joy of annihilation,'" which he feared "would lead India into hideous orgies of devastation -- which ultimately proved to be the case." Here is a description of the wages of Gandhi's "nonviolence," after the "violent" and oppressive British left India:

"The Indians -- gentle, tolerant people that they are gave themselves over to an orgy of bloodletting." Bloodthirsty mobs "surged through the streets from one end of India to the other, the majority group in each area, Hindu or Muslim, slaughtering the defenseless minority without mercy in one of the most hideous periods of carnage of modern history.... Blood-crazed Hindus, or Muslims, ran through the streets with knives, beheading babies, stabbing women, old people." Grenier notes that "we will never know how many Indians were murdered by other Indians during the country's Independence Massacres, but almost all serious studies place the figure over a million, and some... go to 4 million."

So, what have we learned today by this comparison of the microleft and macroleft?

I guess I've learned that I don't really want my son associating with dangerous pacifists. Or maybe he should just beat them up, so they can get it through their thick skulls that pacifism doesn't work.

Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world. --Thomas Sowell

Let's just wish the inferno out with cold and soggy thoughts!

I don't think so. No heroes up in the firmament, no civilization down here on earth.