rebuttal to Obama

In response to Obama's moral equivocation to the Nobel Peace Committee, philosophically justifying war by way of his position as commander-in-chief, along with calling on the official and false accounts of the September 11 attacks, one could certainly restate the overwhelming evidence of US Government complicity in those attacks.

Instead, I will turn it over to a letter I have come across, which I had not heretofore been aware of. It may have been the last letter ever written by Leo Tolstoy, and was sent to none other than the young Mohandas Gandhi. I feel his moral argument for the necessity of nonviolence, in means as well as ends, to be both emotionally moving and--in clearly spelling out the contradiction which Obama now perpetuates--intellectually profound.

[From letter to Mohandas Gandhi, 1910.] The longer I live, and especially now when I feel keenly the nearness of death, I want to tell others what I feel so particularly keenly about, and what in my opinion is of enormous importance, namely what is called non-resistance, but what is essentially nothing other than the teaching of love undistorted by false interpretations. The fact that love, i.e. the striving of human souls towards unity and the activity resulting from such striving, is the highest and only law of human life is felt and known by every person in the depth of his soul (as we see most clearly of all with children)—known by him until he is ensnared by the false teachings of the world. This law has been proclaimed by all the world's sages, Indian, Chinese, Jewish, Greek and Roman. I think it has been expressed most clearly of all by Christ who even said frankly that all the Law and the prophets hang on this alone.
. . . He knows, as every reasonable person is bound to know, that the use of violence is incompatible with love as the basic law of life, that once violence is tolerated in any cases whatsoever, the inadequacy of the law of love is recognized and therefore the law itself is repudiated. The whole of Christian civilization, so brilliant on the surface, grew up on this obvious, strange, sometimes conscious but for the most part unconscious misunderstanding and contradiction.

. . .This contradiction kept growing with the advancement of the peoples of the Christian world and has recently reached the ultimate degree. The question now obviously amounts to one of two things—either we recognize that we don't recognize any religious and moral teaching and are guided in the organization of our lives only by the power of the strong, or that all our taxes collected by force, our judicial and police institutions and above all our armies must be abolished.

. . . Socialism, communism, anarchism, the Salvation Army, the growth of crime, unemployment among the population, the growth of the insane luxury of the rich and the destitution of the poor, the terrible growth in the number of suicides—all these things are signs of this internal contradiction which ought to and must be solved—and, of course, solved in the sense of recognising the law of love and renouncing all violence. And so your work in the Transvaal, at the other end of the world as it seems to us, is the most central and most important of all tasks now being done in the world, and not only Christian peoples, but peoples of the whole world will inevitably take part in it.