Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Two Blasts From The Past

First, President John Quincy Adams on Islam:

“In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE (Adam's capital letters)….Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant…While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.”


And something I wrote more recently on the subject of pacifism:

If one were dealing with an honest pacifist then their fundamental error is that he or she treats the state of peace as an absolute value without regard to conditions or consequences. Values are in fact conditional.

Peace is only an affirmative value to those who live in the condition of liberty, that is being rightfully in charge of one's self and able to set the goals for one's own life. Peace cannot be a value to the subjects of a totalitarian socialist state. To the victim of such a state -- the ordinary worker who is bullied by a commissar, the inmate of a slave labor camp, or the occupant of a darkened cell awaiting murder at the hands of the local chekists -- war, either an internal uprising against the socialist masters, or an invasion by an army of liberation, is in fact the positive value.

But if there is anything that I have noticed over the years, it is that most self-proclaimed pacifists are in fact also advocates of totalitarian socialism who have worked within our political system to prevent the overthrow of their Marxist brethren in other nations, and therefore are also accessories to the crimes of these Marxist states.

Isn't it about time that the self-styled peace movement be exposed and dealt with as such?


What are your questions on this block of instruction?
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