Pacifism Is A Lie
Suicidal stupidity can be disguised as empathy
“I was in the middle of saying ‘as a born and raised New Yorker, we welcome everyone into this city’ when he threw that over my head”, Walter Masterson says, referring to the nail bomb that Emir Balat, 18, used to attack anti-Islam protesters. No scene or sentence could better capture the suicidal stupidity of the pacifist city mouse. It is a Platonic archetype of civilizational decline and collapse at the metropolitan core.
Unable to recognize a mortal threat in the phrase “Allahu Akbar” being shouted by a bomb-thrower, or appreciate that he was being been used as a human shield, or that he was in danger at all, Masterson was pleased with himself. “I’m the guy who didn’t run when a bomb was thrown over his head, I also didn’t become a xenophobic bigot”, he tweeted. “What’s your excuse?” To Masterson, running away from a bomb is xenophobia.
Mr. Masterson, allegedly a comedian, is the fat, happy urbanite who was repeatedly conquered by rural tribesmen fired with faith in Ibn Khaldoun’s North Africa. Balat is comfortably middle class himself, not oppressed at all, but Masterson would insist the foreign-born man’s ‘identity’ is marginalized. Together, the two men are suicidal empathy in one image. A picture worth a million words describing everything that is wrong with the liberal West right now.
Pacifism is a lie. Pacifism says that you have no enemies, and if you do have enemies, then it is your own fault for making enemies in the first place. Pacifism rejects violence as a means of settling violent disputes. Pacifism rejects individual responsibility for the defense of the state or group, shifting the burden of that defense to other individuals.
In economics, this is called a ‘free rider’ problem. In its most patriotic political application, pacifism is a virtue signal. The expenses of any wars that do occur, as measured in blood and treasure, are the measure of the supposed virtue that patriotic pacifism awards itself for having tried peace. It is a bloody, expensive, insufferable self-regard. An egotism of civilians.
However, this form of pacifism does have deep American roots. Consider the classic western. A cowboy rides into town. Someone does something to the cowboy, or to some innocent party, so now the cowboy has to set the injustice straight. In one form or another, I just described every classic western film ever made: a cowboy is too virtuous for war until the war is forced upon him.
This is the essential postwar self-image of America, which had seen itself as a pacifistic nation for most of our history. World War II left the United States the most powerful nation on the planet, a position that has never been truly comfortable for us. As the classic western faded, the western antihero arrived: villains with hearts of gold, flawed heroes, outsider narratives.
This was also the moment when Howard Zinn and Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre produced the postmodern left with its new pacifist mythology: all the wars that ever happen are the fault of capitalism. Smash capitalism, and world peace will break out in a world-historical wave of harmonious human vibrations as the full potential of every unique and wonderful individual person is unlocked.
The promised New Age never materialized. The way this plan actually works out in practice is immigrant children from wealthy neighborhoods throwing nail bombs in Manhattan over the shoulders of latter-day Marxists mewling about the immorality of someone’s bad opinion. This is not a patriotic pacifism. It is useful idiots being used by terrorists with radical foreign ideologies and loyalties.
The cognitive war against our reason, good sense, and survival instincts always makes use of our natural impulse to abhor violence as a solvent, weakening the foundations of peaceful society, so that people with the will to do violence can impose their own program. What leftist street activists call ‘diversity of tactics’ finds its fullest expression here.
Spare me your complaints about Jake Lang. He is a performance artist who brought a goat to the event: a troll. A few of his insipid stunts, such as playing Vanilla Ice “Ice, Ice, Baby” from an ice truck while rolling past ICE protesters, are actually funny. He has never thrown a bomb. He did nothing violent on J6.
Ibrahim Kayumi and Emir Balat, on the other hand, brought bombs to a protest. They are ISIS-inspired terrorists. Like Walter Masterson, Mayor Mamdani is strangely unable to name either of the actual terrorists, but he is happy to pretend that Jake Lang is terrorism personified because he has a bad opinion. New York Democrats are falling all over themselves to condemn bad opinions as terrorism and unable to condemn Muslims with bombs as terrorists for fear of seeming to have a bad opinion themselves.
They pose as good people, these office-holders preening their moral feathers: they are interested only in peace. What they actually want, though, is a war on their own terms, one that empowers them over their domestic political enemies and just happens to erase Judaism from the Middle East. It is a pure coincidence that smashing capitalism requires murdering Jews. You are not supposed to notice how fascist, how very Nazi-like, that is.
If you had wondered how the unholy alliance of leftist radicalism and Islamic fundamentalism happened — if you were confused about Queers for Palestine — look no further. They actually hate us. They want regular, normal Americans dead. They are willing to lie to our faces, to die for their own lies, to watch us get killed and then lie over our dead bodies because the people who killed us found our words disagreeable.
When ‘empathy’ is in fact suicidal stupidity, pacifism finds its fullest, most useful expression in the world: extinction. Pacifism is a desire for the extinction of oneself and their own group. A pacifist can never acknowledge the existence of enemies, must always excuse and forgive the enemy, because the pacifists are fighting the most important war: for equality, an end to racism, an end to war. Our lives are a sacrifice they are willing to make in that endeavor.