Very good essay. And of course, the summation:

"As a culture we tend to be blind to the great qualities of our own civilization, obsessed with past transgressions. Confronting radical ideologies like Islamofascism requires us to believe in our own civilization, in spite of its flaws. We will need to express the power of our culture to others, and why it’s something worth living and dying for. That’s what should be at the center. Western culture can endure only as long as the majority of its citizens promote and have faith in its many ideals, while addressing its imperfections.

A new centrism must establish a refined understanding of our values and morality, who we are as a culture, and what we stand for. Both Churchill and Gandhi stood on solid moral ground. In pursuit of that goal, we must never surrender to the insanity of tyranny. Never, never, never, never."

I think Ghandi could be the pacifist leader we know because he was fighting against the English. Doing the same against Germans, French or Spanish, or any other colonial power, he'd probably never have survived his first days of peaceful protest.

Moreover, the English establishment knew that pouring resources to try to control militarily a big country such as India was not only very expensive, but futile, thus their rule there was quite moderate. They had there just 80,000 soldiers.

Ghandi stated that his policy of non-violence and passive resistance absolutely depended on the basic decency of the British.

I would like to add that the Indian movement succeeded because of the basic civility of the Indian populace. Indeed, India had a civil society (unlike the west) but one in which state repression and recourse to violence was not the norm in curbing behavior.

It is societies where the norm or replacement for civil society is violent repression that pacific movements gain little headway. This occurs most often in modern states where civil society has been consumed by a state apparatus (the Soviet Union and China) or is dominated by competing power nodes whose use of violence dominates all other types of social discourse (palestine).

That is, my opinion nayway.

davis chenault

Great essay! I believe that it will be critical to balance our actions and not believe that force, in and of itself, will resolve the conflict. My concern is that voices of reason that have solid ideas and strategies are being drowned by the extremists on both sides of the debate. If we continue to argue and claim our way (left or right) is the right way, have we disconnected those who have insight to the real and meaningful long term solution?

Churchill and Ghandi reflect similar charactistics that allowed them to stand and be heard during critical periods of their respective histories. Courage, focused direction of purpose, are just a few that immediately come to mind. I believe that Ghandi stated that the intent of peaceful civil disobedience is to provike a reaction. Chruchill viewed that standing in place was the same as retreat. Their methodoldy fits the situation.

I belive that we, meaning Western countries, are in the midst of a battle that has raged for thousands of years. It is not a new conflict, but one that we are engaged in due to the ever shrinking boundaries between cultural divides. Brutal force is needed, however, we can not think that force is the only way to address the conflict. Being aware of what the real conflict is about and learning what the genesis of the conflict came from is just as important to our long term strategy.

Addressiung terrorist is a multi-sided problem and we must begin to plan and execute strategies that reflect all of the issues, not just one.

WRT Churchill:

Violent resistance to fascism is ok. Indiscriminate attacks on the fascists' primary victims (the German population, in this case) is both immoral and counterproductive.

T.J.,

Who wills the end, wills the means.

T.J. Madison:
"Indiscriminate attacks on the fascists' primary victims...both immoral and counterproductive."

- Degrees of discrimination are dependent on technical capability, strategic urgency, the availability of alternative means, and the politics of retaliation.
- The German population the fascists primary victims? I can think of some alternative candidates for that title.
- Counterproductive? Arguable. Immoral? Also arguable.

It was perhaps Germany's very great good fortune that the Allies in general, and the UK in particular, did not acquire a production flow of atomic weapons before 1945.

david chenault: I would like to add that the Indian movement succeeded because of the basic civility of the Indian populace.

Civil except for the relationship between Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh, right? So Ghandi's efforts were crowned by civil war, non-civil war, and one of the world's most dangerous nuclear confrontations.

Glen,

It could definitely have been worse, and Gandhi required a populace with civility in order to execute his strategy in the first place.

Given the sheer number of people involved, I'd say the civility point largely stands even given the partition casualties. In fact, I'd be inclined to treat them as largely separate issues. The people of the Old American South were incredibly civil, after all. The casualty list was still what it was.

I am an admirer of Churchill, partly because we both go to the same sources, such as Joan of Arc (yes that famous slayer of the English), for further inspiration.

I accept Churchill's advice, which I will not quote at length. (He loved to go on at length.) Against sheer evil, which he fought, and which Beslan alone should have been enough to prove to anyone is what we are fighting now: fight on, never surrender, concede nothing, and go as far as you have to.

Against enemies who are not profoundly evil, as the English were not, you can (if you are up to it - it's not easy!) fight like a saint, fight without hatred, sometimes with tears in your eyes for the dying enemy, fight on while forbidding looting and every kind of crime, but nevertheless fight hard, fight to win.

I do not think much of Gandhi's advice. (link)

In 1940, when invasion of the British Isles by the armed forces of Nazi Germany looked imminent, Gandhi offered the following advice to the British people:

I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions.... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them. (Non-Violence in Peace and War)

He also urged Jews and Czechs to commit a mass suicide as an act of non-violent resistance against Nazi occupation. In June 1946 he told his biographer, Louis Fischer:

Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs... that would have been heroism.

Joe -- the antebellum South was pretty violent, much more violent in fact than the North. Read Twain's Huckleberry Finn and the account of "Why Harney Rode Back for His Hat" as well as the account of a lynching to see the everyday violence that Clemens witnessed first hand and knew well.

Genteel behavior could be found in Charleston, Richmond, and other older, seaport Southern cities with a long history of a landed class. Quite another thing in the interior or Gulf, Mississippi regions only recently wrested away from the Indians, Spanish, French or all three, thinly settled and without much law and order. Bowie's famous Sandbar Fight or folks like Crockett or Andrew Jackson are more representative.

Agreed that non-violence has it's place and time. MLK acting say in 1880 would simply have died quickly, the mass media and intelligentsia support simply wasn't there.

>>Who wills the end, wills the means.

This gets us back around to the Universality Principle again. Is terrorism an acceptable tactic? Clearly Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc. were terrorism -- the calculated use of violence against civilians for political purposes. This was especially true of the British bombing campaign, which focused on residential areas and was responsible for the bulk of the civilian fatalities.

If we conclude that these particular acts of terrorism were justified by the (vitally important) aim of defeating Hitler, we lose an important moral argument against OBL & Co. We can then no longer reasonably claim that OBL, Palestinian suicide bombers, etc., are bad people because they kill and terrorise innocent men, women, and children, because we ourselves have acknowledged that such means are sometimes necessary. We are reduced to making the much weaker argument that the political aims of OBL, Hamas, etc. are unjust. At this point claims that OBL, etc. are "monsters" or "the enemies of civilization™" become quite ludicrous.

The Universality Principle is a minimal standard for judging ethics. Without it, most claims of moral outrage reduce to "our opponents are bad because they oppose us." We don't get to have it both ways: if we condemn Al Qaeda for murdering innocent civilians, we must condemn Churchill even more strongly, as he was responsible for the intentional murder of at least ten times as many innocent civilians.

Those who claim that the German civilians were responsible for stopping their evil government have endorsed the logic of Al Qaeda. After all, the USG has been responsible for the murders of a great many innocent people all over the world, and we would consider acts of vengeance directed at civilians in, say, the WTC to be morally abominable for reasons that are obvious.

We should refuse to descend to the moral level of our enemies. This refusal will greatly aid in their defeat.

>>Who wills the end, wills the means.

Are you claiming that terrorism -- the intentional murder of innocent civilians to affect political change via intimidation -- is sometimes JUST and RIGHT?

Or are you claiming that what the British did was not, in fact, terrorism -- in opposition to the statements of Arthur Harris, who administered the British "strategic" bombing campaign?

If OBL is evil and bad because he killed innocent people via terrorism, then Churchill was ten times as evil, because he killed ten times as many innocent people via terrorism.

It's called the Principle of Universality, without which all moral outrage reduces to "Our enemies are evil because they oppose us."

T.J., actually your arguments above are strawman arguments since you are creating a claimed "defense" of the bombing of industrial centers in WWII and then attacking it.

Since the strawman you created wasn't the justification used at the time, and isn't a justification advanced by anyone in this thread, your strawman is an orphan. You have my permission to beat the stuffing out of it ... but no one cares.