War is Obsolete

Not all violence is bad or wrong. Imagine a burglar breaks into your home and threatens your children, is it wrong to defend your home and family? "Non-Violence" is not the rejection of all forms of violence, it is just another political tool to resolve conflict. It doesn't mean "not doing something that is mean or hurts someone else", it simply is a way for people to aggressively attack any authority on moral grounds.

Violence is a tool, it is used to influence people via fear and intimidation or death. That is not always a bad thing, it is the way of nature. That is why humans don't go about attacking animals barehanded. But when confronted with overwhelming force, there is little alternative, we must either submit and die, or find new ways of winning the battle. Non-Violence is a strategy to win the 'heart and mind' of our opponents, and thus defeat them on a higher plane. It is a uniquely human strategy.

Children, playing at violent behavior, should be scolded and taught the social limits of their actions, but be careful not to limit their ability to defend themselves and learn the lesson that other humans can be cruel, so they be prepared to stand up for themselves when their parents aren't around. Else, they may never develop the courage and resilience necessary to survive and compete in an unjust world. War is in our DNA, it is what forced Human Evolution to accelerate, it created the intelligence we use to write these words. War culled the weak, and left us all with blood of a thousand generations of warrior kings running through our veins. But War is no longer an acceptable form of conflict resolution, not because we have suddenly evolved to become Non-Violent Pacifists, but because we have developed such powerful technology as to make war obsolete.

It is now possible for one person to destroy all life in the known universe. This is why we must find new means of resolving conflict, strategies like Non-Violence should be used in Iraq and Afghanistan, not because we can not do violence, not because we are pacifists, but because the use of war is obsolete. The lesson of the Twentieth Century is that no one wins a war, everyone looses.