Virtues

Patriotism may be the "virtue of the vicious" as Oscar Wilde said, but Pacifism is the Virtue of the Victim. There have been two and half successful instances of pacifism changing the world for the better, and only one side was being non-violent at the time. Gandhi's revolution in India was a success, but thousands upon thousands of Indians were beaten, bludgeoned and shot in the process. The Civil Rights Movement in America was largely successful due to Dr. King's stance of non-violent protest...then he was shot. The half is the Christian "revolution" that took three hundred years of being fed to lions before a Roman Emperor finally converted. I wouldn't call that one entirely successful, especially since the symbol of the revolt got crucified. I respect the morality of Jesus, Gandhi and MLK, but the vast majority of times when evil has been defeated in the world, it has come by force. In interpersonal violence, pacifism is suicide. Anti-social predators are not impressed with the morality of turning the other cheek, they simply prey upon the weak and take whatever they want. That can be your belongings, your money, your body, your limbs or your life. The only thing that stops them is more effective violence. In a world without the professionals to whom we outsource our violence, like cops and soldiers, the citizen is left to a world full of predators without a protector class. German Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, for the most part, believed God would never allow the evil that they were witnessing right in front of them (but denying) to happen to them. That is why when the State of Israel was founded--by force--that it adopted the motto "Never Again." European Jews, who founded Israel, had learned the horrible lesson of pacifism in the face of unspeakable, uncaring and methodical evil. The Israelis are not pacifists. Pound for pound, the Israeli Defense Force is the finest fighting force on Earth. Despite all of the wars and attacks on them, trying to finish what Hitler started, they fight on each day and continue to survive. Yet, they are defending a religion of peace, in the holy land, with ground sacred to three of the five major religions on Earth by killing and dying for it. They may be vicious. They are not victims. And they Never Again will be. The difference between the Israeli people and the American people is this: Israelis believe in evil. Many European Jews did not believe in evil. They denied to themselves what was going to eventually happen. And millions of them died. The survivors, who founded Israel, never again made that mistake. By contrast, when America was attacked on September 11, 2001 by unspeakable, uncaring and methodical evil, a shockingly large segment of our population denied it happened the way it did in order to continue to live in the delusion that evil is not real. Another large segment of Americans blamed America for being willing to defend Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, angering the evil lunatics who founded al Qaeda, because it's easier to blame yourself--like a rape victim--than confront the fact that there are evil people in the world. They will kill you, rape you, rape your children, burn families alive in hellfire atop crumbling skyscrapers, all because they HATE YOU, whether you did anything to them or not. I wonder if American Individualism, which I love, causes us not to be able to understand these days why people would hate us as infidels even though we had never met those people before? Or if it's something more pathological that we just cannot live outside of our illusory bubble of protection? So that when it is shattered, we retreat into a state of denial? I think that's probably more likely, but either way, it's delusional. Because there is evil in the world. There are evil men who do evil things to innocent people everyday. The average American has been protected from that evil by professionals for the last 80 years, so they don't believe it is real. But the people in our society who live in poverty, they understand violence, and are not delusional about it. The inner cities of this country are failed states, where armed militias control the streets instead of the governments. They aren't pacifists. It's rich and middle class white folks in this country who are utterly brainwashed into believing that violence can never find them or hurt them, and that evil doesn't exist. They are the pacifists. And therefore, they are the victims of their own virtue. There are hyenas in the world. Be the lion. It takes a lot of hyenas to take down a lion. In other words: Be Armed. Be Ready. Be More Dangerous than Predators! Like and Share! Brian Soule Easy6Training.com