Lest I forget...

The Necessity of Force

When I was teenager, I was a liberal.
Actually, I was a pot smoking, foul mouthed, Marxist spouting little twerp of a hippy.
I got better.

Not all at once, but gradually, I found myself at odds with everything I had once put my secular "faith" in.
My new faith was in Someone and something outside of myself.
But along side of that, I found a world that was full of real heroes.
Those men and women who put their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor above their personal comfort.
When talks broke down, when reason was scorned, when pleas of mercy fell on deaf ears, these heroes sought freedom from oppression with that final choice left to people desperate to choose their own destiny.
Some would call it applied force.
Others, physical resistance.
Or more honestly: violence.

We hear that word today, and many cringe at the term.
But ask any soldier that has met the enemy on the field of battle, and they will tell you that you can use those earlier, prettier terms for it, but violence is still it's name.
And many have paid the ultimate price in it's application.



An excerpt from Starship Troopers, by Robert A. Heinlein:

History and Moral Philosophy.
H. & M. P. was different from other courses in that everybody had to take it but nobody had to pass it – and Mr. Dubois never seemed to care whether he got through to us or not. He would just point at you with the stump of his left arm (he never bothered with names) and snap a question. Then the argument would start.
But on the last day he seemed to be trying to find out what we had learned. One girl told him bluntly: “My mother says that violence never settles anything.”
“So?” Mr. Dubois looked at her bleakly. “I'm sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that. Why doesn't your mother tell them so? Or why don't you?”
They had tangled before – since you couldn't flunk the course, it wasn't necessary to keep Mr. Dubois buttered up. She said shrilly, “You're making fun of me! Everybody knows that Carthage was destroyed!”
“You seemed to be unaware of it,” he said grimly. “Since you do know it, wouldn't you say that violence had settled their destinies rather thoroughly? However, I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea – a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue – and thoroughly immoral – doctrine that `violence never settles anything' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”