Posted on 07/04/2008 12:46:48 PM PDT by leonard33
Next time someone comes after me with a gun, or tries to invade my property, never mind dialing 911.
Who needs law enforcement officers who are always ready to take a bullet for any one of us?
I'm calling whatever number there is for pacifists.
They're sure to come to the rescue. IS there a Pacifist Hot Line? We need the number.
A bumper sticker running along Bleecker Street defined the 1960s: "Need Help? Call A Hippie."
I'm responding here to Nicholson Baker's book, "Human Smoke," which has been getting all the buzz. Baker is a pacifist and argues that, during World War II, pacifists failed but "they were right." Roosevelt and Churchill were wrong. We should quit interfering and let tyrants do their business.
Churchill is especially scathed by Baker who repeatedly terms Churchill a war-lover and a war-monger.
Imagine how different it would have all turned out with a little bit of love? A kind word here and there - and who knows?
Maybe a few hours of therapy would have cured Dr. Mengele of his sadism.
Hitler needed a hug. That would have surely done the trick.
In one of the blogs referring to Baker, someone asked, "How many death camps were liberated by pacifists?"
I can't think of a single one. Maybe it's somewhere in Baker's index. From my own experience, pacifism only works when both sides are pacifists.
That's never the case when one side starts exterminating people. It takes two to pacificate.
Yes, I know. Pat Buchanan's new book reads like it could have been written by Baker. There are differences between the two, I guess.
In the movie "The Counterfeit Traitor," which is based on a true story, William Holden is roped into becoming a spy for the Allies. Hugh Griffith plays the British undercover agent. Holden to Griffith (based on my memory of the movie): "How could someone, like you, become so ruthless?" Griffith: "Watching German planes bomb London helps enormously."
In his review in the New York Times, Colm Toibin assures us that Baker's book offers "a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism." That sounds so good that we can only wish that Baker were around to tell all that to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Arafat, Abu Mazen, Mao, Fidel, bin Laden and all the rest of them. Too bad Baker wasn't around to "reason with" the savages who perpetrated The Bataan Death March.
Did someone forget to tell Charles Manson?
How does pacifism work when you're a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93?
Memo to Baker and Buchanan: There is no containing oppressors mad for the world.
We lived then (under Nazism), as we do today (under Islamo-fascism), in a world peopled by Tyrants Without Borders.
Never mind. If I'm ever in a convenience store at a time when someone rushes in with a gun, I'm praying that the clerk also has a gun, and shoots first, and if I'm ever in a school that's being attacked by a nut gone bonkers on a shooting spree, I'm hoping there's a State Trooper somewhere around with his own firearm, ready to deter.
After we're all safe, I'll let Nicholson Baker explain the wrongness of it all.
About the author: Jack Engelhard's latest novel, THE BATHSHEBA DEADLINE, now in paperback, places journalism at the center of our war on terror and has been cited as a "towering literary achievement" by Letha Hadady and as "a rousing thriller about the global conflict with Islam" by bestselling author Robert Spencer. Engelhard wrote the international bestselling novel "Indecent Proposal" among other five star books on Amazon.
Yes, pacifism worked so well recently in Myanmar.
//sarc
Pacifist, my a**!
One of his fiction books, “Checkpoint” (2004), is about plans to assassinate George W. Bush.
Were Nicholson Baker a true pacifist, he would not be warring against warmongering.
In reality, he is a two faced forked tung lier of an warmonger claiming to be a pacifist.
The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.
- Theodore Roosevelt
It's a considerable advance for someone in such a frame of mind to finally see that maybe SOME citizens should have firearms and that sometimes that prevents bad stuff. But it's just one step toward the distant vision of, "Why shouldn't I a firearm and be able to defend myself and to help defend somebody else and to help prevent bad stuff?"
When he reaches that point, he'll begin to "get" America. It's about taking care of ourselves and each other. It's NOT about paying the government to take care of you, except in enumerated and specific ways.
All evil needs to prosper is for good men to do nothing.
A pacifist is a good man doing nothing.
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