Interesting scenario

[Banquo's Ghost]

At some point, in the face of certain types of evil, inaction is every bit as morally reprehensible as action that allows for the possibility of some innocent civilian casualties. Examples?

Rwanda, Darfur, El Salvador and Nicaragua, Cambodia, Siberia... all the places in the world in histor where we as a global community knew full well evil was happening and we were too cowardly to act. We can console ourselves with the fact that we harmed no innocent civilians by refusing to intervene, but do you think that makes the millions of survivors of these horrors feel any better?

This is the central dilemma for those of us who espouse non-violence. I wrestle with this issue many times.

Inaction is not part of non-violent resistance however. Non-violent resisters are not innocents, they seek to place their lives in a place of jeopardy to force combatants or oppressors to think and discover their humanity. But can the inevitable loss of resistance lives at the hands of a truly amoral and evil regime ever overturn that regime?

The belief is of course, that all tyrants die eventually. That people finally tire of war and death. But the time frame is often likely to be longer than a violent confrontation to end evil. In that time, many more innocents may die than would have been the case in war. Or perhaps, the violence of war causes many more deaths, but in a shorter time scale?

My only article of faith in this dilemma is that we try war much too easily and so we have very little empirical evidence to answer these questions. Would that we tried non-violence for a change. I doubt that many more lives would in fact be lost than we have seen in the conflagrations of war. It would need real courage, and by many people who might otherwise be happy to let their armed forces carry the burden. I certainly believe that the Palestinians would have won far more in a non-violent campaign of resistance than they have by violence.

Anyway, I digress from the topic somewhat.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

The belief is of course, that all tyrants die eventually. That people finally tire of war and death.

As individuals perhaps, as a species I don't think we tire of war at all. Since our first societies piled together more resources than they needed to survive for a few days we have fought one another. I suspect we shall continue to do so until some external enemy (if such exists) forces us to band together to survive their onslaught.

[Banquo's Ghost]

As individuals perhaps, as a species I don't think we tire of war at all. Since our first societies piled together more resources than they needed to survive for a few days we have fought one another. I suspect we shall continue to do so until some external enemy (if such exists) forces us to band together to survive their onslaught.

You may be right, Seamus. I hope not, and believe not, despite the evidence.

I believe societies are made up of individuals - who can make a difference, and influence others to the same. Europe for example, spent four thousand years fighting amongst itself, but has managed to grow beyond that to a stable peace in most parts - as long as you don't count intellectual wars about banana straightening. It's not a great example, but it shows it can be done (even if we did need a pretty startling catastrophe to bring us to our senses).

We have the capacity to be more than our species' instinctual programming. I don't have to kill anyone today, and neither does anyone else.

[rory_20_uk]

Wars recently in last 100 years in Europe:

Two world wars
Spanish Civil War
Russian Civil War
Two Balkan Wars
Recent Yugoslavia Civil War
Russo-polish war
Russo-finnish war

Yeah, really quiet...