Jul 19, 2005

'Humanitarian Intervention in Hundred Acre Wood'

Pooh contemplates the other work of A.A. Milne.
“Fascism is simply autocracy up to date. Being an autocracy it is based on force. … To keep the devotion of this army … all the picturesqueness of real war must be invoked: the salute and the uniform, the speeches, the banners and the war-songs: even, from time to time, the intoxication of victory over an elderly Jew or an outnumbered political opponent. That such an army should have occasional longings to ‘bring its human energies to a higher tension’ is natural.”

Who cared about the elderly Jew? I do, thought Pooh (desperately not trying to sound like his mat(e), The Cat in the Hat).

So, Pooh thought, Milne supported Jew–hating, anti-semitism and bullying as a natural event. Pooh remembered that Milne described himself as a pacifist. He also remembered reading Thomas Cushman’s introduction to “A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq” that mentioned “George Orwell once noted in a famous epigraph, ‘Pacifism is objectively profascist’”.

Pooh finally decided which side he was on. He was for the moral case for humanitarian intervention.

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