Thanks Howard, very powerful.

Nonviolence remains a more powerful approach to eliminating tyrants. It makes fewer enemies, it galvanizes worldwide support, it brings out the best in one's enemies, it is environmentally responsible, and it arouses no desire for payback.

It's truer to our ideas, to our religious beliefs,
and provides abetter lesson in how to solve serious problems for our young, and for future generations.

We would be a generation the future will bless, instead of curse for squandering resources and goodwill.

This is all evidence of a failure of imagination, of an underlying moral impotence.

Mike, when has non-violence ever removed a tyrant.

To you know what tyrants do to dissenter, non-violent or otherwise -- they shoot them.

Don't be so naive. It costs people's lives.

Ghandi. Martin Luther King.

When India threw out the East India Company and the British Raj.

When Martin Luther King overthrew Jim Crow.

The Cold War generally was an example of waging war without violence between the major powers.

When the Politburo replaced Chernenko with Gorbachev.

When the Serbian legislature caused Slobedan Milosevich to step down (admittedly, with large parts of Belgrade in ashes.)

When boycotts against Nestle and Nike and California grapes effected social change.

The Berrigans' efforts against the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

Sure, people with weapons will often try to use them. And they can always kill people. There are no guarantees. But neither does violence guarantee a happy solution. Indeed, committing violence crosses, for most people, an ethical line that invites retribution from without and corruption within.

The Pope is hip to it. He sees the moral emptiness of our case. But W. knows more about the heart of God than some old Polack, eh?

We've seen in our own country, in the past 18 months, how the hunger for vioelent revenge has altered our way of life, and our historic values -- with no sense of greater security.

It may even be naive. But calling something naive is more an insult or dismissal than an argument. At what point do you dismiss Jesus and Moses and Buddha as naive, when their naivete has created a sense of moral protection from chaos for tens of billions of people for thouisands of years?

Take away the wisdom of prophets like King and Gandhi and Thoreau and we are back in the 4th C. BC, and alexander is on the march.

Values and collective action are our only real defense against brutality.

Naive, I suppose. But the track record speaks well for naivete. Go to a museum and look for pictures of Jesus, then look for images of Caesar or Hitler. The former are images of universal admiration, the latter are usually decapitated.

All right action arises from a sense of the universality of human experience. This is why dropping bombs on people is wrong -- because they are the same as us.

Every war ever waged tries to blot out this fact. And historically they usually succeed. The Germans in WWI were called Huns, impaling Belgian children on bayonets. The Japanese lacked even pupils in their eyes to humanize them. Vietnam had its gooks. Now we are at war with the camel-jockeys and towel-heads.

I am naive, but not so naive I think peace will prevail in the short term. I am sketical of that. These things take lifetimes and centyries to achieve, and all we can do today is our small part, move our little grain of sand.

It's taken us all of history to get to this point. All we can do is nudge it a little farther, like a peanut down the sidewalk.

But in the really long ruin, is it so naive to back the winner?

I was drafted into the United States Army in Vietnam. I lost a lot of friends. 56,000 boys' lives came to nothing, all for a good idea like yours.

War loves naivete. Come on, boys, it's glory out there, just a few yards over that hill. And don't they always start walking?

Ghandi didn't overthrow a dictator. Britain was a democratic imperial power. It was susceptible
to moral persuasion.

Non-violance is a great tactic when dealing with powers that can be pursuaded. Dictators can't be pursauded.

It's laughable, sad, pathetic and so telling of your political paradigm that you think MLK was using non-violence against a dictator. Less you forget, MLK was in AMERICA. The United States. Ever hear of it?

As for the overthrow of Gorbechev -- Gorby can't accurately be described as a dictator. He was a reformer and marginally at least a democrat. He was carrying his nation toward democratic, capitalist reform anyway. When his country was threatened with violence and turmoil, he didn't respond as a Stalinist would have -- with tanks, bombs and bullets. He stepped aside.

As for Cherenko being replaced by Gorby ... normal transition of power in the U.S.S.R. The Politbro really didn't know what they were getting in Gorby. Hell, I don't think he knew either.

Again .. California is a tyranical regime? Could have fooled me. I've lived here all my life.

Jesus wasn't a pacifist. Read your Bible.

Mohammed certainly wasn't a pacifist.

Again, I ask again -- when has non-violence ever removed a tyrant from power?

I've posted a more detailed response on my site:

"If Ghandi had lived in Saddam's Iraq, he'd be dead"
http://www.howardowens.com/index.cfm?action=full_text&ARTICLE_ID=1045

MLK fought sheriffs, attack dogs, bombers, arsonists, hoodlums, malicious state troopers, state investigators, the KKK, assassins, lawyers, the media, the benign neglect of the Eisenhower administration, the Congress -- many forms of despotism and oppression, from malfeasance to nonfeasance.

He fought the essence of evil in our society, evil backed by position and power. Evil that did not deem Negroes to be human beings.

It is odd being lectured on history by someone so deficient in it.

Also, you have pulled a classic Wurlitzer bat and switch. The argument is not for pacifism -- denial of war. I supported NATO in Yugoslavia. I supported The U.S. in Afghanistan. Armies have their purpose.

But in the long run we must rely on subtler ways of communicating. It is very hard with dictators and those who are committed to nondemocratic subjugation as in India, which is a good chunk of your point. But sometimes, as in the examples I cited, it works.

It is for Christian action -- which Jesus was pretty much for.

You play in your playpen, I've got people of goodwill to talk to. You lack goodwill, and while I do not consider you among the unredeemable, I do consider you among the redeption-averse, and I do not think I am Gandhi enough to make much of a dent.

You strike me less as an ideologue than as a player. You're hoping there's a place for you at the table with people who share your distastes.

For you the war is a career move. For me, it's a question of obeying the word of God.

When I'm in this kind of debate, I close my eyes and do a Peggy Noonan, and imagine what your positions would have been in other days, on other issues ... on slavery, on women's suffrage, on the right of citizens to disagree with the crown. Where would you have stood on torture, or the rights of the yeomanry, or child labor, or the destruction of the Amazon, or the genocide of the Indians, or the excesses of mercantile rule.

And I ask myself, is it possible, that while you are a liberal today, you might have been a liberal in other times, when history so desperately required persons of good will to look beyoind the status quo?

And, still Peggy Noonanlike, I decide you are a not a liberal today, and would not have been one then, either.

That's a pretty serious accusation. Do you think you would have had the liberality to oppose the capture and enslavement of African people? If so, explain your metamorphosis. Why was it right to be liberal then, but liberalism is a curse word today, for you and your tribe?


It's not an impossible stalemate, but without mutual goodwill, there are things both of us can do more efficiently.

MLK fought sheriffs, attack dogs, bombers, arsonists, hoodlums, malicious state troopers, state investigators, the KKK, assassins, lawyers, the media, the benign neglect of the Eisenhower administration, the Congress -- many forms of despotism and oppression, from malfeasance to nonfeasance.

He fought the essence of evil in our society, evil backed by position and power. Evil that did not deem Negroes to be human beings.

It is odd being lectured on history by someone so deficient in it.

Also, you have pulled a classic Wurlitzer bat and switch. The argument is not for pacifism -- denial of war. I supported NATO in Yugoslavia. I supported The U.S. in Afghanistan. Armies have their purpose.

But in the long run we must rely on subtler ways of communicating. It is very hard with dictators and those who are committed to nondemocratic subjugation as in India, which is a good chunk of your point. But sometimes, as in the examples I cited, it works.

It is for Christian action -- which Jesus was pretty much for.

You play in your playpen, I've got people of goodwill to talk to. You lack goodwill, and while I do not consider you among the unredeemable, I do consider you among the redeption-averse, and I do not think I am Gandhi enough to make much of a dent.

You strike me less as an ideologue than as a player. You're hoping there's a place for you at the table with people who share your distastes.

For you the war is a career move. For me, it's a question of obeying the word of God.

When I'm in this kind of debate, I close my eyes and do a Peggy Noonan, and imagine what your positions would have been in other days, on other issues ... on slavery, on women's suffrage, on the right of citizens to disagree with the crown. Where would you have stood on torture, or the rights of the yeomanry, or child labor, or the destruction of the Amazon, or the genocide of the Indians, or the excesses of mercantile rule.

And I ask myself, is it possible, that while you are a liberal today, you might have been a liberal in other times, when history so desperately required persons of good will to look beyoind the status quo?

And, still Peggy Noonanlike, I decide you are a not a liberal today, and would not have been one then, either.

That's a pretty serious accusation. Do you think you would have had the liberality to oppose the capture and enslavement of African people? If so, explain your metamorphosis. Why was it right to be liberal then, but liberalism is a curse word today, for you and your tribe?


It's not an impossible stalemate, but without mutual goodwill, there are things both of us can do more efficiently.