Now I'm tempted to tear into this, go on and on about how there can be no basis for peace when you don't acknowledge the fundamental value of human life, including those of the unborn, how he obfuscates and covers over the use of violence to make it seem to be in the service of peace, but I won't. Instead, I'm going to let T.S. Eliot and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn do my talking for me.
Obama, drawing on Kennedy, talks about a "gradual evolution of human institutions" to eliminate evil.
To which T.S. Eliot, the former American, sends in this preemptive strike some seventy-five years in advance (because after all, preemptive strikes are the American way- don't turn the other cheek, slap the other person before you have to),
"They constantly try to escape-T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock
From the darkness outside and winthin
By dreaming up systems so perfect that no one will need to be good"
And as this guy at Touchstone magazine points out (by way of Christianitytoday), this would place the responsibilty in the hands of someone higher up rather than individuals. One can imagine Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who experienced this kind of thing first hand, adding,
"This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: is it permissible to merely carry out orders and commit one's conscience to someone else's keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superiors? Oaths! Those solemn pledges pronounced with a tremor in the voice and intended to defend the people against evildoers: see how easily they can be misdirected to the services of evildoers and against the people!"-A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
-This passage comes at the end of a chapter entitled "The Kids with Tommy Guns" about the young, indoctrinated guards of the Gulag. The guards were never allowed to speak with any of the prisoners, only given leave to shoot any of them. He relates the story of one guard who believed a prisoner was about to run out of the column he was marching. The guard squeezed off a burst that killed five men. When other guards' testimony had shown the column to be marching quietly along, he was given the punishment- fifteen days detention (in a heated guardhouse) for killing five men.
And finally another quote from Solzhenitsyn, this about the use of violence in general,
"Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle."
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