Violence: Predatory vs. Protective
Sun June 6th, 2004 14:43 MSTThe Smallest Minority (another Arizona blogger) has an excellent essay on useful and useless views of violence.
This recognition of the difference between violent and predatory and violent but protective illustrates the difference in worldview between people like me, and the (we’ll call it) pacifist culture.
Britain today represents a perfect example of the pacifist culture in control, because that culture doesn’t really distinguish between violent and predatory and violent but protective - it sees only violent. Their worldview is divided between violent and non-violent, or passive. There is an exception, a logical disconnect if you will, that allows for legitimate violence - but only if that violence is committed by sanctioned officials of the State. And even there, there is ambivalence. If violence is committed by an individual there is another dichotomy: If the violence is committed by a predator, it is the fault of society in not meeting that predator’s needs. The predator is the creation of the society, and is not responsible for the violence. He merely needs to be “cured” of his ailment. If violence is committed by a defender, it is a failure of the defender to adhere to the tenets of the pacifist society. It is the defender who is at fault because he has lived by the rules and has chosen to break them, and who must therefore be punished for his digression.
Read the whole thing, and you might understand why those of us in the former wild west are often well armed, and schooled in the laws of proper application of deadly force. At the same time, you’ll get an idea of the vacuity of the European views on the subject.
Great article. One might say it should be required reading, but the pre-requisites for understanding its meaning aren’t there anymore.
Britain is a good example, and if you read anything by Theodore Dalrymple, who occasionally writes for National Review and The Spectator (in England), you will understand the extent to which the culture of predatory violence has matastasized in Britain along with the collapse of the “right” to self-defense.
Someone, maybe Mark Steyn offerred the gem that if you leave the issue of your self-protection to The State, you are a bystander to your own fate. Pacifism and its bastard child, passivity, invites predatory violence.
interesting article
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