Next weekend is the Forest City Stockade festival. In the 1860s, a group of settlers quickly constructed a defensive structure and hid inside it for a few days, shooting from the top of the wall at Indian raiding parties.
Very often, pacifists are clearly right: violence is no solution to human problems. It just postpones and deepens the problems and freezes the moral imagination. But stockades make very good sense. It would not have been in anybody's interest -- long or short term -- for the Forest City Massacre to have joined the Acton Massacre on the list of wrongs the soldiers had to avenge. Keeping people from starting or expanding wars is a good use of resources.
The problem for pacifism I think is that one cannot do credible defense without the threat of violence: the stockade would not have worked without the rifles in the watchtowers. And defense does limit violence: it limits the power of small groups of angry people to start major wars and major disruptions of the structures on which life depends.
I am conscious that the defensive umbrella has been extended in the United States to cover most of our military action since 1945. We project overwhelming force halfway across the world -- to defend ourselves. But still, pacifism has to say something about defense.
Posted by shea0017 at August 17, 2004 11:35 AMif your going to write about the Forest City Stockade, write about it! Don't write about your point of view on things. Because if someone is trying to find some information about it, the only thing that we find on your page is your point of view.
Posted by: sherry at December 10, 2007 1:53 PM