Or, why Democrats should not be in charge of national security

Gandhi’s tactic of non-violence is often foolishly credited with the peaceful liberation of India. This claim would be more impressive if the British Empire hadn’t expired but was still around with a large retinue of colonies, instead of having disposed of its colonies, many around the same time as India. And considering the bloodshed of Partition, despite Gandhi’s best attempts at appeasing Muslims it was hardly peaceful. Yet despite the hypocrisies that have dotted Gandhi’s life, his ideas continue to have a powerful hold on the Western imagination.

Few would seriously argue that had Gandhi been facing Imperial Japan (whose brutal conquest of Asia he briefly supported) or Nazi Germany or even the British Empire of the 19th century, that non-violence would have been nothing more than an invitation to a bullet. Yet that is exactly what first world nations are expected to do when confronted with terrorism. Not long after 9/11 slogans were already appearing on posters challenging, “What would Gandhi do?”

We can hazard a guess at what the man who urged Britain to surrender to Hitler and told the Jews to walk into the gas chambers, would do. We can do better than guess at the outcome. The same outcome that surrender to tyranny always brings, whether in the name of non-violence, cowardice or political appeasement, a great heap of skulls shining in the sun.

Gandhi’s non-violence or Tolstoy’s more honestly named, Non-Resistance to Evil through Violence who heavily influenced Gandhi or Tolstoy’s own influence through the writings of Rousseau represent a pacifist strain that runs through Western civilization. It is a particularly futile and dangerous strain that values internal nobility over the lives and welfare of others.

Non-violence is either redundant or dangerously misguided. When confronting an opponent, that opponent’s goals are either violent or peaceful. If his goals are peaceful then non-violence is redundant. If his goals are violent, then non-violence achieves nothing. The political victories of non-violence have come mainly from a nation that wanted a peaceful outcome seeing violent suppression of protesters through violent law enforcement tactics. While this produced political victories, it also demonstrated the inherent pointless of it, as it only worked with a nation that was already prepared to reach a peaceful agreement.

Had Martin Luther King tried his tactics in the early 19th century South, he would have gotten nowhere. Had Gandhi pitted himself against Imperial Japan, he would have been beheaded. Clearly non-violence is a tactic that can only work against essentially peaceful opponents who are easily embarrassed by a few jailed protesters. It fails utterly against opponents who genuinely want to conquer or kill you and are willing to do whatever it takes to see that it happens.

Had the application of non-violence been limited to a form of civil protest in democracies, there would be no objection. It is when Gandhi is cited as a model for confronting dictatorships and tyrannies that we reach the fundamental gap between reality and the ideology of non-violence.

Can non-violence stop an enemy bent on your destruction? The answer is no. Non-violence can only enable such an enemy. But the nasty trap in the philosophy of non-violence is that it presumes that a source of the violence is in the victims themselves.

This is why when Gandhi advised the Jews to go willingly into the gas chambers, he described any protest by the Jews to the West as itself violent. Only by being willing unprotesting sacrifices could the Jews fit Gandhi’s model of non-violence. This is shocking only to those who fail to realize that “Blame the Victim” is inherent in the philosophy of non-violence. Unsurprising from a man who degraded and abused his wife and drove his sons away, and yet continues to be regarded as a sort of saint.

The self-destructive nature of non-violence is that it only works when the source of the violence really is within the individual practicing it. Non-violence only works therefore when non-violently confronting those whose goals are ultimately non-violent. It is self-destructively useless when confronting those whose goals are violent. But because it teaches that we are the source of the violence, it repeatedly blames the target of the violence for doing anything whatsoever to resist the violence.

In Gandhi’s non-violence, a rape victim who screamed for help would be guilty of practicing violence rather than non-violence. In Tolstoy’s rendering of non-violence, there is no difference in moral culpability between attacked and attacker. This simplistic picture leaves no room for self-defense and no place for a society that seeks to protect its own people. When viewed this way it exposes the ideology of non-violence for what it really is, a self-indulgent selfish form of martyrdom that emphasizes inner nobility over social utility.

At the heart of non-violence is hypocrisy. Quaker non-violence prevented them from funding a militia to protect colonial settlers against attacks. It prevented them from serving on either side in WW2. It did not however prevent them from composing lists of victims for the Nazis. It has not prevented them from agitating on behalf of terrorists today.

Tolstoy’s non-violence did not prevent him from distributing and promoting the writings of violent anarchists, it did however prevent him from condemning the Pogroms. Gandhi’s non-violence did not prevent him from self-interestedly welcoming a Japanese occupation of Asia or urging a British surrender to Hitler.

The common denominator of non-violence is a contempt for the victim of violence and a slavish need to appease or appeal to the violent. Given a choice non-violence will elevate the perpetrator of naked violence, over the peace-loving people and nations doing their best to stop him. The former has the glory of an unambiguous sinner ripe for conversion, while the latter appears to the philosopher of non-violence as an obscene heresy that uses violence to achieve peaceful ends.

For the democracy confronting a destructive ideology, non-violence is nothing more than a suicide pact. The refusal to resist evil grants hegemony to evil. But the refusal of the philosophers of non-violence to admit the necessity of violence instead drives them to demonize those who would resist evil with violence, as the source of the violence.

RESIDENTS have been left fuming after around 70 trees were chopped down in a Laindon chainsaw massacre.

Stunning oak, weeping willow and silver birch trees which lined several roads in the town have been felled in their dozens within the space of two days to make way for the multi-million pound regeneration of the Five Links estate.

Local residents have been left astounded by the destruction.

Mark Butler, 47, a contracts manager of Brimsdown Road, Laindon, said: “I drove my wife to the train station on Wednesday morning and the trees were there as normal.

“When we returned that night they were all gone. Why on earth would anyone want to cut down these lovely trees?

“I called the council for an explanation, but nobody seemed to know what was happening.”

Ralph Morgan, 63, of Sandon Road, Laindon, said: I have lived in this area for 50 years and I’ve never seen anything like this.

“It’s absolute destruction of nature. These trees were beautiful and really brought something to the area. It makes me sick that someone has done this to our local environment without any warning.”

The trees, some reaching up to 40ft tall, had lined the verges of High Road, Newbury Side and Heterill as well as surrounding green areas for decades.

Chris Johnson, spokesman for Basildon Council, said the developers would plant new trees as part of the planning agreement. He said: “The trees are being removed by developers as part of the multi-million pound regeneration of the Five Links estate.

“This regeneration scheme is designed to improve the lives of residents living on the estate and create 186 much needed new homes.

“Under the planning agreement, the developers are required to plant new trees and other green spaces to replace those being lost.”

Copenhagen - Seven Danish Muslim associations were planning to appeal to Denmark's highest court over the publication of 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked violent protests in 2006, reports said on Thursday.

A spokesperson for the Islamic Society told Danish media that a lawyer was working on the appeal to the Supreme Court.

Earlier, a Danish district court and an appeal court had turned down cases filed against the former managing editor and cultural editor of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, which published the cartoons in September 2005.

The Muslim associations maintain that Muslims were slandered when the prophet was depicted as a terrorist and war-monger, but both Danish courts ruled that the publication was not slander.

Islamic Society spokesperson Bilal Assaad said the groups were prepared to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, should the Supreme Court not support their case, news agency Ritzau said.

In February, Danish security police said they averted a plot to murder newspaper cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, who made one of the 12 cartoons, depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Matthew 11:28-30

The variation is found within the gene for an enzyme called cytochrome P17, which is utilised in the metabolism of sex hormones. According to researchers it leads to a high tissue concentrations of the hormones which could then influence the development of the brain.

Clemens Tempfer and his tram at the University of Vienna discovered the variant within DNA samples from 49 female-to-male transsexuals and 102 male-to-female transsexuals as 1,669 samples.

The proportion of male-to-female transsexuals and non-transsexual male control samples carrying the gene was around the same. But with women 44% of transsexuals carry the gene compared to 31% non transsexual women.

Linda Geddes writing in the New Scientist said: "While there are many women with the variant who are not transsexual and many female to male transsexuals who lack it, the finding raises the possibility that the variant makes women more likely to feel that their bodies are of the wrong sex, and that this is a result of their brains having been exposed to higher than average levels of sex hormones during development."

Mikael Landén of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm told the publication: "The present study found that a mutant gene that ultimately results in higher testosterone levels is overrepresented in female-to male transsexualism.

"This is in line with what we previously know about masculinisation of the brain and is therefore less likely to be a chance finding.

"Hence, the study is important and adds to the notion that gender identity is influenced by sex hormones early in life, and that certain gene combinations make individuals more vulnerable to aberrant effects."

Janett Scott, formerly the president of transsexual support group, the Beaumont Society said: "Nature may have made us the way that we are, but nurture is what gives us a problem."