Pacifism

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - American hostage Tom Fox, whose body was found dumped beside a railway line in western Baghdad, was tortured before being shot dead, Iraqi police said on Saturday.

"His hands were tied behind him and he had gunshot wounds. There were signs of torture," a police source told Reuters of the 54-year-old who was kidnapped along with three other peace activists last November.

Fox was a Christian pacifist, but he and his group were about as pro-Muslim and anti-US as it is possible to be. He was a useful idiot for the other side, but they still murdered him. They also tortured him first; it seems that hearing your helpless victim scream is part of the fun. One reason Fox went to Iraq was to find evidence of torture. He found it.

Pacifism can be a useful tactic, depending on the nature of the enemy. Gandhi was successful against the British, but the Germans or the Russians would have, at some very early stage, simply put a bullet into his brain and thrown his body in a ditch. Gandhi, being a very intelligent man, was well aware of that. It's what separates a Gandhi from a Tom Fox, who succeeded only in committing suicide by jihadi.

It's hard to know what to think about people who adopt pacifism as a generalized absolutist position, the one you see expressed on bumper stickers that say "War is Never the Answer." One rationale is that pacifism exists precisely to provide a moral model, to define the moral ideal, to show us where the compass should be pointed. But, as Wretchard asks, what kind of morality can it be that forbids you to kill the car bomber, as he barrels toward the school bus?

I don't think pacifists like Tom Fox resemble Gandhi (or Martin Luther King) at all, because they are not using pacifism as a rational, tactical move to achieve political change. People like him seem to be on a very different kind of mission, one of achieving personal moral perfection. That sort of quest always seems to require adopting a mystical view of the world, and it often ends in martyrdom. That people should be free to pursue their own spiritual goals goes without saying. But when one of these holy moths flies into the flame, the people who display those bumper stickers make a mistake in seeing any political meaning in that, or tactical sense, or guide to moral action in the real world.

Byron