The only way to defeat brute force is to overpower it with a stronger one.
So there was this Debate competition where I had to submit a write up for both ends of the argument. This is my submission. I did not get shortlisted but I still think I submitted a great entry.
A) FOR THE TOPIC
“I do not believe in a supernatural basis for evil. Human beings have the capacity to commit the most depraved of acts on fellow human beings”. The quote summarizes the evil in the world around us. In our cocoons, we shut ourselves away from the fact that there are evil people around us and mistakenly believe the world is all civil and nice to each other.
But once in a while, evil becomes a force united by an army of hundreds that can roll through nations brutally destroying everything they comes across.
The armies of Nazi Germany were such a force, so was the regime of Pol Pot and in the same league were the murderous Japanese forces who brutalized every nation they conquered in World War 2.
So what does one do when confronted by such a great evil. An evil that will listen to no reason and will show no mercy.
The answer is simple- “Reply back with a greater force!”
History shows us that only defeats in the battle fields turn back conquering armies. When met with a greater force , even evil will ask for mercy and turn back. To wait for the empires of evil to collapse on their own, is to let the world be as it is and let innocents suffer. The regime of Khmer Rouge was finally defeated by an invasion by a neighbouring country. But that was too late for more than one and a half million people who had by then been shot and just left to rot in the killing fields of Cambodia. Those fields still stand today as a testament to the evil of humans. In the time that it took for the Nazi empire to be defeated by the Allied powers, over 5 million people were butchered in gas chambers and concentration camps.
Imagine if these empires had survived or flourished? The world would have been a very ugly place today.
Of course war is never a good act. The replying force is also as brutal as the evil they seek to vanquish. The Allies indiscriminately bombed the German civilian population , bombing entire cities to dust. And once they won the war, the Germans were placed in a blockade where the average nutrition per German citizen was restricted to near starvation levels. Imagine starving the entire population of a country just because the earlier dictator of the country chooses to go to war. The Allies never stopped at that of course- Germany was divided among two countries, entire industries were dismantled and the equipment shipped to America and Germans were told that they would be paying an annual compensation for the war for the next 20 years.
In the end it is the victor who writes the history but we must believe there is something called a ‘just war’. Barack Obama , the president of the United States of America focused on this in his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech to justify the contradiction between peace and the war in Afghanistan.
B) AGAINST THE TOPIC
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” Voltaire in this quote states what we all know- there is no just war and there are no benevolent liberators. The soldiers of war are just glorified murderers.
There are multiple justifications for war. No nation goes to war as the aggressor rather they paint themselves as the victims forced to act in their self defense. The other nation is always portrayed as evil, dysfunctional or just simply a mortal enemy. Violence is always masked by myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was.
However the truth is that there are no just wars. Each war is as brutal as the other. Innocents die even when a population is bombed by predator drones using laser guided bombs or carpet bombed by B-52 fortress bombers. Battle weary soldiers see no difference between civilians and enemies. In all wars the local population has also been massacared.
So what do you do when faced with a brutal force? Do you give in and accept humiliation in the hope of surviving.
No, I believe every evil force in the world must be resisted. It has to be resisted with non-violence in the great traditions of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. There can be no violence. To fight fire with fire is to just create a larger fire which will destroy everything around. Martin Luther King said that the trouble with violence is that it’s a cycle that destroys the creator himself. We can see the example of the same in India itself where Indira Gandhi as the Prime Minister encouraged Bhindrawale’s violent extremism to gain political mileage in Punjab. Later when Bhindrawale went out of her control and violence ravaged Punjab, the army was sent into the Golden Temple and Bhindrawale was killed. Indira Gandhi herself was killed by her Sikh bodyguards who were enraged by the perceived desecration of the Golden Temple. The cycle of violence was complete.
India’s freedom struggle is the greatest example of a brutal force defeated by peaceful means. The British empire was no less brutal or no less powerful than any evil that humans have known. Protestors were beaten, imprisoned, exiled and sentenced to death if they could be. An Indian was considered inferior to a white person. It did not matter how many Indians were killed, the British Empire was to reign supreme. Yet it was just one man who was derided once as a naked fakir(beggar) who brought this force to the negotiating table. Mahatma Gandhi won our freedom and our eternal gratitude without the mass bloodshed that has characterized freedom struggles the world over.
Nelson Mandela succeeded in ending apartheid in South Africa only when he agreed to non violence and sat down to negotiate with the evil force.
And just last week Sudan, peacefully partitioned into two nations just on the basis on negotiations that many said needed a NATO war to stop the genocide in Darfur.
If it could work with a dictator like Bashir, a brutal empire like the British and the philosophy of white supremacism , I believe non violence in various forms can defeat any brutal force in the world.
