Pacifism

I imagine a hard thing for good world leaders is making decisions about going to war, so recent decision to send more troops to Afghanistan must be hard for Rudd and Obama.  The principle is, I suppose, doing a lesser evil to allow a greater good. Though this is slippery slope stuff, and indeed the difference between politics and philosophy or ethics.

(Read for example an awful account of a current defamation trial in The Age. An alleged rapist and brutalist is alleged to have said about his brutality and killing of his enemies 

(Reporter),Paul  McGeough reported (in an interview with the man known as  Captain Dragan )  as saying: "Because of me, fewer have died than might have. And I don't think you will see any prisoners of war treated as well as ours."

Such language is of course total and utter rationalization. )

Thomas Merton says:

"I have learned that an age in which politicians talk about peace is an age in which everybody expects war: the great men of the earth would not talk of peace so much if they did not secretly believe it possible,  with one more war, to annihilate their enemies forever"

 in The Collected Poems pp 374-75  as in Seeds p. 34

Our beloved leaders would do well to hear this caution