Responding to according2grayson’s passionate defense of non-violence and the Golden Rule while encountering bullies (as well as while opposing despots on the march), Steve-O-in-NJ enriched Ethics Alarms with an epic response including historical perspective, ethics and personal experience.

Here is his terrific post—long but not to be missed—and the Comment of the Day, on Comment of the Day: “An Unethical Website, Golden Rule Malpractice And The Worst Anti-Bullying Program Ever”:

I question this litany of life experiences, since it sounds a bit too pat and a bit too neat to be real, or at least it sounds sanitized/incomplete. Those with truly outstanding records usually don’t feel the need to trumpet them. That said, I wasn’t there, so maybe it is all true.

I know I tried the non-violent approach a few times, and it just lead to more bullying. I also tried the fight-back approach, smashing one bully’s head against the sidewalk and nearly strangling another, and it frankly didn’t get much more done beyond getting the bullies off my back temporarily. That said, a temporary respite from abuse is better than absorbing abuse every day without a respite. What really broke one group of problem people was a combination of finally going to the authorities and the people overreaching.Despite the justified criticism of Catholic schools (a whole separate discussion), they did have one very big thing going for them: no one who was enrolled had to be, or had any right to be, and dismissal or necessary discipline was easily accomplished.

One day after a particularly difficult bus ride in, I finally took things, with names, to the dean of discipline. Somewhere in the week around this complaint one of the same people bullied another student, who weighed maybe 110 pounds soaking wet, by grabbing his nose and twisting it almost to the point of breaking. Needless to say, there was no hiding what had happened when that kid’s parents saw him coming home with a nose the size and color of a beet, and frankly I question the gray matter of someone who would inflict a visible injury like that in front of witnesses and expect there not to be consequences. The bullies were subsequently suspended and in the case of the nose-twister removed from the bus permanently, with a warning that one more infraction would result in his dismissal, and the entire busload of students got a stern talking to by the dean. Bottom line: unless this crap stopped forthwith, more people would end up finding their own way to school, and no refunds would be made for the bus transportation. That was the end of that, and my conscience is clear for taking action that I probably should have taken earlier.

I have in fact received at least three Facebook friend requests from people who I had problems with in the past, one the jerk I nearly throttled to death after CCD, one an idiot who was thrown out of Scouts after pouring Vienna sausages inside a tent and getting caught (he later got into drugs), and the third a then-nascent thug who attacked me for no real reason after school and was finally physically restrained by a crossing guard after ten minutes of verbal and physical bullying. All three were denied and blocked, and I ask myself why these people think I would even want to talk to them after all these years when they don’t offer an apology or even an excuse, not even a lame message to the effect of “can’t you take a joke?” Sometimes the right thing to do is take action, and, although carrying a grudge is probably counterproductive, no one’s under an obligation to let someone back in their lives who brings nothing but grief to the table.

As for the Gandhi/Berrigan question of pacifism, here is part of an earlier note I wrote, starting with WWI:

I’m not sure in the aftermath of World War I that we quite knew what we were getting into with the nascent Communist government in Russia. Lenin ruled with an iron hand, although he disguised it with propaganda, and Feliks Dzerzhinsky, initial leader of the Cheka, which later evolved into the KGB, was blunt about being in the business of state terror. I’m not even sure we cared if we did know. After the brutal trench warfare in France and Flanders and Wilson’s posturing to try to achieve some grand peace, a return to normalcy, even a withdrawal, sounded good to most people. Pacifism sounded like a good alternative, and many attempts to outlaw war, and so forth were tried. However, all this did was allow Mussolini and Hitler and the Japanese the breathing room they needed to rebuild and start conquests, small at first, but then growing bigger and bigger, till Japan turned Manchuria into Manchukuo and the Germans stood ready to take Poland. Still we didn’t take action until the Japanese moved against us. What had the pacifists to say to that, other than Jeanette Rankin, who stupidly cast the only vote against fighting WWII?

World War II was not something we could afford to fight with kid gloves, either, nor should we have. The other side was murdering innocent people by the minute. I saw up close the planes used to deliver maximum damage as used by both sides, and I have no apologies for the Allies raining death on either Germany or Japan after the damage both did. I saw the Enola Gay, which then-Colonel Paul Tibbets used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He remained unapologetic to his dying day, and I do not blame him. Neither the Dresden raid, which pretty much burned down that city, nor the atomic bombings occurred in a vacuum. The Germans had repeatedly bombed London and other civilian targets and made no bones about the fact that they were looking to get Operation Sea Lion under way and conquer the UK. The Japanese had attacked the US without declaration of war and then fought us for four extremely bloody years. They were not about to give up, as was clearly shown by their introduction of the kamikaze tactic, and then the manned missile they called the ohka, or cherry blossom, but which we called the baka bomb, the Japanese word for crazy. It was either drop the bomb, or invade the Japanese home islands, there were no other options. Both sucked, but the second one sucked with 300,000 American casualties. The pacifists’ response to our decision to take an action that spared these American lives? The response was to throw blood and ashes at the plane. Those perpetrating this act would rather the Allies had done what? Invaded Japan instead? Halt the war on Japan’s doorstep? Or maybe not respond to the attack on Pearl Harbor at all? None of this makes sense, unless you let your beliefs blind you to facts.

Then came the long drum roll that was the Cold War, armies ready to move, though they never moved, missiles ready to launch at a moment’s notice, and spying and counterspying everywhere. It was here that some of the worst excesses of hard-core pacifism or more likely pacifism functioning as a cover for bad ideology, came to be. Most of the student counterculture was not about bringing peace to Southeast Asia, it was about “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.” [Editor’s Comment: Don’t forget “not having to serve.” In my experience, that was the primary motive for most campus protestor “idealism” in the Sixties.]

The fact that no one on the political left said word one after the US withdrawal from Vietnam and the relatively easy conquest by the Communists thereafter and that some like Noam Chomsky tried to defend Pol Pot and the “killing fields” gives the lie to the idea that somehow this was all some idealistic young generation reaching out for a cause. It wasn’t. Nor were the many honest-to-goodness traitors to the west who emerged simply misguided idealists.
Some like Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, who passed any number of secrets to the Communists, were motivated by ideology, which is to say they were blinded by their adherence to the foolish worldview they picked up at liberal university during a time when the West was losing faith in itself because of its own failures and Communist lies. Others, like Robert Hanssen, the villain of the infamous “breach,” were playing games for the thrill of it rather than any other reward. More than a few, like Aldrich Ames, were simply unable to manage their finances and sold out to the other side.

I’m not sure any of these are the worst, though. A special category, I think, should exist for those who use high-sounding ideals to cover up fairly banal evils, which, without the high-sounding ideals, no one would give a second thought to condemning. John Murtha garnered himself a great deal of attention by speaking out against the war in Iraq and proposing legislative initiatives that would have significantly hampered the effort, as well as his failed attempts to smear American marines regarding the Haditha incident. What’s rarely mentioned is his involvement in the Abscam scandal and his attempts to steer government work to his brother, which was still being looked into at the time of his death. Murtha, who voted for the Iraq war, did not have some great moral awakening, he knew he was in trouble and was looking to deflect attention away from what he’d done. Since the hard left and pacifist movement will defend anyone unconditionally who agrees with them, he looked there.

Philip Agee, who died in a run-down apartment in Havana in 2008, after trying his level best to undermine the intelligence capability of this country, including the exposure of literally dozens of agents abroad, was no idealist either. He was someone who had hit a brick wall to promotion because of irresponsible drinking, complete inability to manage his finances, and an inability to stay away from colleague’s wives. So he turned on his former employers, of course saying all the time that the CIA was evil and he was just trying to stop this evil. Again the pacifist sheep flocked to his cause, but at the end of his life he was reduced to attempting to arrange visits to Cuba for American tourists.

And let’s not forget Scott Ritter, the weapons inspector who resigned in frustration over Iraqi cheating and retreating, but who suddenly became almost an advocate for the Iraqi cause after being paid off to write a documentary that said Iraq was a defanged tiger and being nabbed trying to set up a sexual encounter with an underage girl. He got only probation for that, but as the dog returns to its vomit, so did he return to this vile practice, and now he faces up to seven years in prison. Yet some on the pacifist left still defend him.

At last comes the present day with us attacked on our own soil by the man we finally took down ten years later. American forces have done more than their best on the peaks of Afghanistan and in the desert of Iraq. The Taliban regime,who hacked off limbs and forced women into hiding is long gone, as is the psychopathic Hussein crime family. Syria has given up its hegemony over Lebanon and Gaddafi, long-time nemesis of the US and troublemaker, may soon join them in oblivion. Oh, and as mentioned at the beginning of all this, bin Laden is dead, and dumped in the sea, where the fish nibble at his eyes and the lobsters pluck at his feet.

Yet through it all the nattering pacifists, or those who call themselves pacifists, have been there every step of the way, saying idiotic things like if we did not take action after 9/11 there would be world peace, or that we should not move on Afghanistan because it would interfere with charity work that no one was benefiting from anyway, or that Iraq was somehow a better place before we took action to remove a tyrant to whom rape rooms and acid baths were a way of life. They offer no alternative solution to any of these problems, they simply say no to any kind of action. The capstone to this idiocy was the unhinged Cindy Sheehan’s statement that bin Laden was not dead and that we should put away our flags and wake up. While she simply opposed the Iraq war she might have had some credibility or at least the sympathy factor, but this last statement has revealed her for what she is, simply a contrarian and a media hound.

It’s my conclusion that pacifism at its best is a bankrupt idea that offers no real solutions to any of the world’s problems, and in fact does nothing but stand in the way of the solving of problems and the administering of justice when it becomes necessary. At its worst it’s a cloak for those who would thwart necessary action by those seeking to protect the Western way of life. There needs to be a fundamental realignment of the discussion of war and peace to the point where pacifism is treated as simply no longer worthy of serious consideration, just as you would no longer listen to someone who said the world was flat, and its adherents as those who have forfeited their place in the discussion and do not deserve to be listened to.

Just to add Berrigan’s discussion to things here, neither of the brothers have/had much credibility if you read their writings, which are essentially rants against America’s defense of the west and the western way of life. Philip Berrigan was frankly nothing more than a vandal, who spent about eleven of the last twenty years of his life in prison for attempts to damage the US military’s capabilities that amounted to theater of the absurd and embraced every cause inimical to the west.

I don’t know whether he even deserves the title of useful idiot. Anyone who cites him as an ethical authority is a COMPLETE idiot.