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Pacifism Thread

Started by Kyuuketsuki, November 12, 2008, 03:42:02 PM

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Kyuuketsuki

This was posted in another forum:

QuoteTitle:
Pacifism and relying to police and army as outer force

Subject:
When last year school shooting happened in Finnish school, almost all professors in my faculty spent some time to comment it. Two of them concentrated on the fact that in recent shootings nobody stopped the attacker. One professors speech was so impressive that I still remember it. "People let them selves to be shot. Nobody resisted.":He said.
"But they were afraid", some of us replied. Professor continued:" that is the the problem " People were afraid to fight more than they were afraid to die. Then he continued to describe differences in between ancient Creek free mans and slaves from HomÄ"ros viewpoint. Free man is the one who controls himself, is able to defend others and can't be bought. Slave is the one who choses not to be free, because they were man who refused to fight till the end and gave up. Then he full of pathos explained that Greek phalanx were indestructible because they all were equal and free side by side. In line formation every man who rushes or falls behind endangers others. While they all went in line and one fallen was replaced by the next they won. Then he gave rhetorical question:"How the hell it was possible that he had time to reload his guns again and again, but nobody attacked the shooter " He ended his lecture by pointing to problems of consumerism and destruction of classical education system.

That speech was so powerful, that I'll remember for long time. But I'm not sure that I can agree to all of his views.

I'm not entirely sure what he's saying.

Kyu
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rlrose328

I get what he's saying... I don't know that it has anything to do with pacifism or not, which I think of as a philosophy (prefering nonviolence to violence when dealing with situations).  What follows is my thought process only... I have no website or studies to back it up, it's just a reasoning process.

In this case, it's a frame of mind.  In ancient Greece and Rome, the soldiers formed unbreakable lines of attack so it was harder to push them back and thus, defeat them.  During the school shootings, students and teachers all cowered and didn't fight back, even as the shooter was reloading.

What this poster fails to understand is that soldiers are trained and browbeaten to be ruthless and ignorant of danger.  The regular person being too frightened to respond in the defensive is natural in the stated school shooting situation.

During the 9/11 tragedies, one of the planes went down in a field because those people fought back.  They were mostly men fueled by testerone and they fought back because they were protecting the innocent people who were being targeted by the bad guy, as soldiers are trained to do in fighting situations.

My dad talked to be a lot about his time in Vietnam and the way they were trained at length to fight however they were told to and not question.  That's the difference between the average person in a stressful, defensive position and trained soldiers such as our armed forces and the ancient Greeks and Romans.

IMNSHO.   :D
**Kerri**
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LARA

The paragraph you quoted is kind of hard to follow, but it reminds me of the Phoenix Temple Slaying in 1991.  The monks were shot and the temple was robbed and there was no evidence of the monks resisting or fighting back.  Now granted, there were four robbers and they had weapons, so it resistance might not have been possible, but I would think that the realization "I'm going to die anyway so I might as well try to fight back" would have occurred to the monks.  But Buddhists are highly pacifistic so this resistance may have been trained out of them or they may have just been hoping if they allowed themselves to be robbed they would have been left to live and go on.

I think the author is saying something like consumerism is to blame for our lack of resistance in the face of danger.  Our trained consumerism is what leads to our obedience of any perceived authority.  But if you look at my example of the Temple Slayings, these monks, following a religion that rejects consumerism and materialism, were just as vulnerable.  

It isn't a problem to be blamed on consumerism.   It's a problem that can be blamed on training obedience with no concurrent training in self-defense.  I would hazard a guess that most people are naturally pacifistic unless trained to be otherwise, which is what I think rlrose328 is saying.

But is it an advantage to the state to train people to fight who can later fight against the state?  From the state's self preservation point of view, soldiers have to be taught to obey the state first, know their master before they are trained to fight.  Otherwise they pose a risk to the powers that be.

This is also very interesting in the case of religion and the U.S. Army where Christian prayers are used to help bind the armed forces cohesively.  This bothers me because they are training soldiers to follow a different master than the U.S. government, in my opinion.  The symbols our soldiers should rally around are those that are uniquely American; the flag, the lady liberty, the eagle; rather than those that are Christian-based because America is based on religious freedom and our soldiers need to protect American citizens of all faiths.

At least in my arrogant, oh so Machiavellian, opinion.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
                                                                                                                    -Winston Smith, protagonist of 1984 by George Orwell