whoever fights monsters...

... should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

~ Fredrich Nietzsche

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Conquerors have all through history been conquered by those they conquer. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, proved either a shrewd student of history or a prophet when he reputedly said, “Even if we lose, we shall win, for our ideals will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies.”

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World War II, many still feel, was a just, or atleast a necessary, war. Nonviolence as a means for settling international disputes is so recent—an international nonviolent movement (apart from the “peace churches”) dates only from 1914- that the means were simply not in place inside and outside Germany to mount an effective nonviolent alternative. It may well be that in ten or fifteen years we will be more prepared to respond to conflicts with an international outpouring of nonviolent resistance. So perhaps there was, tragically, no alternative at that time to war.

The point I am making is that even if a war does appear to be just, or atleast tragically necessary and unavoidable, it will inevitably require that relatively more just opponent (if there be such) to become increasingly molded into the likeness of its adversary. The greatest evils are usually perpetrated by people determined to eradicate an evil by whatever means necessary. War is not, then, a mere continuation of diplomacy by other means, as Clausewitz claimed. It marks the abject failure of diplomacy, and the adoption of means that have very little likelihood of achieving desirable ends.

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“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy”

~ Martin Luther King

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Some of us engaged in struggles for social justice have been incredibly naïve about what has been happening to our own psyches. Our very identities are often defined by our resistance to evil. It is our way of feeling good about ourselves: if we are against evil, we must be good. The impatience of some activists with prayer, meditation and inner healing may itself represent an inchoate knowledge of what they might find if they looked within. For the struggle against evil can make us evil, and no amount of good intentions automatically prevents it from happening.

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No wonder so many people, gentle and kind people, quiet and unaggressive people, find themselves saying at long last: “There’s only one way to deal with the Marcoses and Enriles. There’s only one way to deal with the Khmer Rouge. There’s only one language these people understand – we say it not joyfully, but reluctantly and sadly—the only thing they understand is the gun.”

To such people I say: Welcome home, welcome to the largest consensus the world has ever known: a consensus between east and west, between capitalist and communist, between mosque, church and synagogue. All agree that there comes a time when it is just to kill each other. Welcome home to the consensus on which our world is built.

Ultimately we are faced with two choices: to accept the “myth” of the just war, that as a last resort killing is moral, or to accept the ”myth” of nonviolence: we have no last resort, killing is never right. In the first case, we will come to the moment when the conditions for using violence are verified, when we reach the “last resort”. In the second case, believing in our “myth”, that violence is never justified, having no “last resort,” human beings come up with alternatives from the depths of their creativeness… We can and we will learn to live together, but only when we have closed off that escape route known as the last resort”

~ Niall O’Brien, “Making the Myth Real”

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All of the above text, including quotes, are from the chapter “On Not Becoming What We Hate” in Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers (Published in 1992). (Is the history of the world but a narrative of violence where right and wrong is determined by the victors? I suppose the answer is not so simple.)