In his 1941 review titled “No, Not One” of Alex Comfort’s novel No Such Liberty, George Orwell explains that the protagonist of the story is put before a tribunal because he has “declared that he will not fight against the Nazis, thinking it better to ‘overcome Hitler by love.'”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Notwithstanding the bestial attacks in Germany, the carnage against Christians throughout the world, the brutal rapes and assaults being propagated by jihadist “refugees,” the institution of child marriage throughout the Islamic world, the frightening increase in global anti-Semitism, and the censoring of free speech, it is clear that Orwell’s prescient essay needs to be reiterated as he asks that we “consider … facts which underlie the structure of modern society and which it is necessary to ignore if the pacifist ‘message’ is to be accepted uncritically.”
Orwell asserts that “civilisation rests ultimately on coercion. What holds society is not the policeman but the good will of common men, and yet that good will is powerless unless the policeman is there to back it up. Any government which refuse[s] to use violence in its own defence would cease almost immediately to exist[.]”
Yet we see Germany, France, and Sweden unraveling because the police have lost control as Muslim communities become no-go zones and law and order are abandoned. Soeren Kern describes the more “than 40 problem areas” (Problemviertel) across Germany. These are areas where “large concentrations of migrants, high levels of unemployment, and chronic welfare dependency, combined with urban decay, have become incubators for anarchy.” In fact, “the problem of no-go zones is especially acute in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany’s most populous state.”
Speaking of the Nazi scourge, Orwell maintains that “since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it.”
Fast-forward to the jihadist scourge that besets the world today. Does not pacifism, by default, become pro-jihadist? Shall we call it pacifism of the soul that the Netherlands finds a courageous man like Geert Wilders guilty of free speech for pointing out the dangers of the Muslim immigration?
Orwell also takes great issue with the “calculated campaign of deception” of news media and asserts that “no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.” He emphasizes that it gives him “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history.” Echoes of fake news, indeed!