Maureen Dowd makes a really subtle and interesting point in last week’s New York Times.
Only fools or knaves would argue that we could fight Al Qaeda’s violence non-violently.
Okay, maybe not so subtle. But she must support the claim somewhere, right? Like, with something other than an insult and an assertion?
The subsequent sentence doesn’t help; by then she’s already back to where she began the essay—heckling President Obama’s Republican detractors and defending her right to celebrate bin Laden’s death. Maybe the previous sentence will help us understand why she is calling all the people who have called for more sensible responses to terrorist violence “fools or knaves.”
The really insane assumption behind some of the second-guessing is that
killing Osama somehow makes us like Osama, as if all killing is the same.
I guess we’re “fools or knaves” because we’re insane. And/or because we hold some kind of philosophical position about the nature of killing. It’s a sad reminder of how invisible serious nonviolent points of view are in the mainstream media, and how quickly someone like Dowd thinks they can be dismissed—even more quickly, in this case, than some Republicans’ recent attempts to defend Bush’s torture tactics. We at Waging Nonviolence have our work cut out for us.
I’m curious how many times, though, one can read Dowd’s insults before they simply turn back on themselves.
Not surprising that Dowd takes this tack, given her friendship with the late Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. Kelly, who died in a jeep accident in Iraq in 2003, used two of his 2002 columns to paint pacifists as traitors. Upon his death Dowd penned a glowing tribute to Kelly and her friendship with him.
The lonely road of nonviolence is out of fashion with Obama and his “realist” supporters. The recent review of the new Gandhi biography in the New Yorker, as well as Martin Duberman’s new comparative biography of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds, provide some rectification regarding the role and efficacy of nonviolence, but the waving flags of revenge seem to represent a dominant sentiment at the moment.
I hope that the image of the nonviolent as nothing more than a group of limp-wristed doormats is soon destroyed, though it seems unlikely. People who dismiss the nonviolent action so quickly clearly do not understand that we are motivated to change our present condition with new thought and works, not just by laying down and allowing ourselves to be stripped of our dignity. However, if they choose to think me foolish, then I would rather be the fool than be one of the herd.