A Former Pacifist

Jeff Jarvis, owner of the excellent WarLog has this to say:

Six weeks after…. I grew up watching the Vietnam War over dinner — when we were allowed to see the blood and the fear, not just green blobs on a nightvision screen — and that’s one reason I declared myself a pacifist at an early age. It was easy then. It was a cause. Vietnam was an unjust and just stupid war; I hadn’t seen a just war in my lifetime. Back then, when I announced my pacifism as only a dogmatic kid can, adults would, of course, challenge me with Hitler and I’d blather my way around it. But now we post-World-War-II children are facing our Hitler in Bin Laden and his cult of killers. We are facing the urgent need to end an evil before it attacks anew. We are in a just war that I know we must win not for justice or even revenge but for protection. We have not seen war on our land before and we have not seen war like this, a war without even the rules of war and certainly without the rules God or Allah, take your pick. This is a war of hate and there is no rational way to fight that. We have only one response: to protect our children, to fight and win. So I look up today, after the mass murder at the World Trade Center, after the start of biowar on our shores, after the start of an epoch of fear, and I realize that I am a former pacifist.

I wonder how many other former pacifists we’re likely to see as we get a better look at the horrors that the Taliban have inflicted on the Afghani people?