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Pacifism Grips Europe
Beneath the European political and media classes’ gripes, groans and intellectualising of the Madrid atrocities there lies a more sinister current.
Pacifism.
Pacifism as a concept was so named by the French in 1920s. It reflected a mood in war-weary Europe, perfectly summed up by the scandalous Oxford Union debate motion “This house would not fight for King and Country.”
Pacifism took such a grip in the late thirties that it was chiefly responsible for allowing the Nazis to roll half way across Europe before we belatedly woke up.
Pacifism was part of the fabric of European socialism then as well as now. It cuts across the political divide however: Like their contemporary counterparts, many conservatives opposed war with Hitler.
During the war it was an integral part of the logic of collaboration.
The intellectual and artistic luminaries of post-war Western Europe did somersaults to apologise and lie for Stalinist butchers right up the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The KGB could not believe the quality and quantity of help they got from European pacifists, as Martin Amis recalls in his book on Soviet terror, Koba the Dread.
Today, the European Commission's president Romano Prodi declared that "It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists." The Guardian, last week, urged Europe's leaders to go beyond the concept of "good guys and bad guys", as the bodies of men, women and children were still being pulled from the wreckage of trains in Madrid.
Pacifism is not just someone who doesn’t believe in fighting. It is someone who thinks that by unilaterally laying down your weapons your enemy will kindly reciprocate. Appeasement will quell the beast.
It is a dangerously deluded philosophy that has been at the root of allowing the worst mass killings the world has known. Many of which, incidentally, happened in Europe.
The current global threat has a leadership and a structure with clear aims: to destroy us all. They want to turn our cities into concentration camps, our countryside into killing fields. The terror attacks in Madrid show they are carrying out their threat.
Europe is at war.
Pacifists, however well-meaning, will make Europe the battleground for global terror. America’s response to 9/11 proved that it was not the giant weakling Bin Laden suspected. Islamists know that China and Russia would not tolerate a threat to their people in the same way Europe would.
Europe has become the west’s weak link.
The pretence that this is all some kind of domestic policing issue and the consequent refusal to take the fight to the enemy will see Europe overwhelmed by activists and terrorists. Many may already be living in our cities, as European governments abandon the pretence of monitoring the influx of immigrants.
As always we end up paying a heavier price in the end for our inability to act. History demonstrates this only too well.
For most of the last century only America’s mobilization saved Western Europe from being overrun by mass-murdering bigots.
Only America has the means and the will to confront today’s mass killers.
Who, on the other hand, can save Europe from its pacifists?
