L.B.: Pistol-packing pacifist

Left Behind, pg. 456

We left off here:

Carpathia raised the .38, cocked it, and stuck the barrel into Stonagal's right ear. The older man at first jerked away, but Carpathia said, "Move again and you are dead."

We've discussed how disappointing it is that the Antichrist's first on-screen kill should involve something as mundane as a handgun. I was hoping for something creepier, something a bit more supernatural or cinematic.

A second disappointment here involves the death of my dim and implausible hope that Nicolae Carpathia might turn out to be an interesting tragic villain. Up until those two sentences above that was still, at least theoretically, a possibility. After all, Nicolae came preaching a message of "love, peace, understanding and brotherhood." If he had genuinely believed in such ideals, but had tried to impose and enforce them by imperial fiat, we'd have been looking at the stuff of tragedy. This scene confirms that's not going to happen here. Nicolae Carpathia, it turns out, is just going to be one of those mustache-twirling villains inexplicably dedicated to villainy for villainy's sake.

What's harder to figure out is whether this villainy makes Nicolae a hypocrite in the authors' eyes when he's preaching his message of love, peace, understanding and brotherhood. Nicolae Carpathia, remember, is also a "thoroughgoing pacifist," a man described as "a peacemaker ... leading a movement toward disarmament."

Now we find this alleged pacifist wielding a gun and threatening lethal violence. In any other book, I'd know what to make of that. "Aha," I would think, "so he's not really a pacifist after all." Seeing the character's actions contradict his words, I would conclude that his words must have been false. Actions speak louder, etc.

Here in Left Behind, however, things are a bit more complicated. In these pages, words are almost always more important than deeds. And in these pages I'm not certain that being a "pacifist" precludes killing people with a handgun.

Let's deal with the latter point first. We've noted earlier (see "Cursed are the Peacemakers") how Nicolae's pacifism and his dedication to peacemaking marked him as morally suspect from the authors' point of view. This idea is simply a given for Tim LaHaye and his premillennial dispensationalist colleagues, and they treat it as such, presenting this audacious bit of up-is-downism with a disarming matter-of-factness. The Antichrist is diabolically evil, they say, and so of course he's a man of peace, what else might one expect?

As Alice discovered in Wonderland, this kind of confident, reassured madness can be difficult to engage. We don't have any way of knowing what the rules are when we talk to such people. The accustomed meaning of words and logic don't seem to apply. It doesn't help when LaHaye et. al. explain that they're just repeating what they read in the Bible because no amount of Bible-reading will take you through the looking glass to this alien world where goodness is proof of evil.

So let me try to retrace their steps as they travel from Point A to Point Crazy.

It starts with this idea of the Antichrist. We looked earlier (see "Speakerphone") at the way PMDs put together their Antichrist Check Lists by collecting every generic warning against evil in the Bible and reinterpreting these as a unified warning against a single, future personification of evil: The Antichrist. This vast collection of biblical passages warning against evil includes several passages warning readers not to be deceived by false promises of peace.

So far, so good. According to the convoluted allegorical scheme of the PMDs "literal" reading, then, it makes sense for them to apply those warnings about false promises of peace to this future Antichrist. But that's as far as the internal logic of this scheme takes you. If PMD were consistent with itself, it would teach that the Antichrist will be a sham-peacemaker, someone who pretends to be concerned with peacemaking, but really isn't.

That's more or less the picture one gets from the early 20th-century prophecy gurus -- people like C.I. Scofield, the man who first popularized Darby's psychedelic invention through his "Reference Bible." To Scofield and his contemporaries, the Antichrist would be an evil man who, at first, pretended to be a good man. Part of that false facade of goodness would be the Antichrist's claim to be a proponent of peace. Their assumption, in other words, was that genuinely advocating peace was a Good Thing. They believed that by pretending to be good, pretending to be a man of peace, the Antichrist would lull the world into a false sense of security and then, abruptly, reveal his true self: the rider on the white horse, armed and crowned, riding out "as a conqueror bent on conquest." They saw "man of peace" and "conqueror bent on conquest" as two different, incompatible things.

Scofield's contemporary heirs, however, seem to think that "peace" and "conquest" are just two words for the same thing.

In the latter half of the 20th century, the most popular "Bible prophecy scholars" -- from Hal Lindsay to Tim LaHaye -- moved away from the idea that the Antichrist would be making false promises of peace and began to suggest that this ultimate personification of evil would be an actual peacemaker. This happened, in part, due to their reinterpretation of PMD through the lens of America's so-called "culture wars." LaHaye came to PMD carrying with him all the baggage and presuppositions of his John Birch Society, McCarthyist Cold-War paranoia. Lindsay came to it in full-blown panic over Vietnam and the '60s. Neither of them was capable of imagining such a thing as a false peacemaker because they did not believe there was such a thing as a genuine peacemaker.

To LaHaye and Lindsay, all peacemakers were, by definition, false. All proponents of peace, from their point of view, were duplicitous fools -- not peacemakers, but peace-niks. At best they might merely be cowardly, dovish dupes, but at worst they are subversive fifth-column agents of the enemy.* The PMD teaching that the Antichrist himself will one day rise from the ranks of such peaceniks simply confirms what they already believed to be true: that anyone advocating peace should be presumed guilty.

So the biblical warnings not to be deceived by false promises of peace have evolved into the belief that any promise of peace -- or any effort to achieve peace, or any policy that includes peace as its ultimate stated goal -- is itself false and, in fact, Satanic.

This belief has real-world repercussions. Many of those biblical warnings specifically mention deceivers making false promise of peace with Israel. Thus whenever LaHaye & Co. hear anyone speak of a plan for peace in the Middle East, they assume that this person is helping to pave the way for the Antichrist's imminent reign -- or that he may even be the Antichrist himself. All such plans -- from Oslo to the current "Roadmap" -- are therefore denounced as evil and vigorously opposed in the name of "supporting Israel." Supporting Israel comes to mean ensuring that it never achieves peace with its neighbors. Up-is-downism as foreign policy.

So let's get back to the scene we're reading now. Since LaHaye views peace only as a mask for conquest, it may be that we're not meant to see anything contradictory at all in what we're witnessing. Nicolae Carpathia is a pacifist. Nicolae Carpathia sticks a loaded gun in Jonathan Stonagal's ear and pulls the trigger. For LaHaye, that action doesn't reveal Nicolae's true nature as a lethally violent non-pacifist, but rather it reveals what he believes is the lethally violent, tyrannical true nature of pacifism itself. (Poor LaHaye must be terrified in Amish country.)

Really, though, it's hard to know what to make of this apparent contradiction between Nicolae's claims and his actions because the universe of Left Behind doesn't recognize such contradictions as a possibility. In this book, words trump actions. The authors have stated that Nicolae is a pacifist and, according to the rules of this book, that makes him a pacifist even when he's firing a gun into someone's ear.

Bad Writing reinforces this. LB offers innumerable instances in which what we are told about a character seems to contradict the behavior we witness from that same character. We're told, for instance, that Buck Williams is a "star reporter," much admired by his readers and his peers for his unrivaled journalistic skills. But what we actually see of Buck is a lazy, incurious, ethically compromised hack who never files a story. Likewise we're told, repeatedly, that Rayford Steele is a good person, while the evidence we have been shown all seems to contradict this.**

But the Bad Writing here is, I think, part of the effect and not the cause of this inverted hierarchy of words and deeds. The problem isn't a failure of execution -- it's not that Jenkins is trying, but failing, to have the characters demonstrate the things he claims about them. The problem, rather, is a seeming disregard for any such correspondence between words and actions. He doesn't have to care whether or not they correspond, because it's only the words that matter. In a sense, then, Jenkins' notion of characterization matches his and LaHaye's notion of salvation, repentance and conversion -- they're all just a matter of saying the magic words.

And but so anyway, here we are:

Carpathia raised the .38, cocked it, and stuck the barrel into Stonagal's right ear. The older man at first jerked away, but Carpathia said, "Move again and you are dead."

Does this mean that Nicolae Carpathia is no longer a pacifist? I have no idea.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* We looked at this anti-peacemaker attitude in that earlier LPU&B post. There I wrote of people like LaHaye that: "They've gotten so caught up in guarding against wolves in sheep's clothing that anything in sheep's clothing is viewed as the enemy. So all sheep must be shot on sight." That probably understates the problem. LaHaye doesn't believe there's really any such thing as sheep, just a wooly fifth column of wolves.

** We're also told repeatedly that Rayford Steele really, truly loved his wife Irene, even though neither readers nor Irene ever saw much in his behavior that would demonstrate this to be true. I'm willing to give L&J a partial pass on that one since this particular mistake is hardly unique to LB. The idea that love is something one says or feels (passionately and sincerely), rather than something one does, is a widespread confusion shared by many people who have never even heard of this book.

Comments

[Kerlyssa]

Comments broken?

[Ursula L]

First!

And Carpathia just told Stonegal to get on his knees, Stonegal refused, and now Carpathia says "one move and you're dead."

So now, Stonegal is supposed to stay standing?

[Lila]

Ahhh, the smell of first-draft preteen fanfic.

[Lila]

So...this is probably a stupid question, but how do L&J handle "blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God"? Do they go with the alternate "cheesemakers" reading?

[azazel]

Fifth!

[SchrodingersDuck]

An entire post based on two sentences?... Awesome!

I think perhaps part of the reason Carpathia is supposed to be seen as a pacifist despite poking a gun in a guy's ear and threatening to blow his head off is that many off these right-wing anti-peacers fail to fully connect war with violence. War is those brave men in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing. Violence is for cowards! War isn't about shooting people, building bridges and shelter under heavy-gunfire, or escorting casualties through a battlefield. It's about explosions! Fast jets! Big tanks! Being a Hollywood movie hero!

The people who espouse this viewpoint, under the auspices of "supporting the troops", are perhaps the least supportive of all - it's precisely this "war is a sanitized romp through the desert" mentality that results in veterans languishing in awful underfunded military hospitals, or being denied treatment - even called cowardly - for coming home with shell shock or other psychological trauma.

Nicky holding a gun to the man's head while claiming to a pacifist isn't a contradiction to these people - this is about one human waving a gun at another human, in a place close enough to be on the reader's doorstep. War is about an object, known as "Us", against a nebulous ill-defined "Them", in a distant, unknown land, shown in 30-second soundbites on the evening news. The two are completely unrelated, as far as the target audience cares.

[SchrodingersDuck]

So...this is probably a stupid question, but how do L&J handle "blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God"?

Blessed are the people who don't wave guns in people's ears, but are not opposed to the idea of ear gun-waving in general, for they shall be called the children of Tim LeHaye.

[Praline]

Scofield's contemporary heirs, however, seem to think that "peace" and "conquest" are just two words for the same thing.

There's a deeper reason for this, I think: to believe in the epic story they've assigned themselves to star in, it's psychologically necessary for them to be engaged in a heroic struggle. You can't struggle without someone to struggle against. And to them, this means a guy in a black hat.

Struggling with your own imperfections makes you look imperfect, which they don't want to admit. Struggling to love your enemies is hard work and doesn't allow you to project all your vices onto someone else; if they accept 'Judge not lest ye be judged', the have to admit that they might not come out of the judgement looking squeaky-clean either, which again involves admitting imperfections. They need an enemy.

Hence, fighting isn't just a question of fighting your enemies till they stop doing whatever it is you disapproved of. It's also a fight to have an enemy, because identifying the enemy, the guy who makes you look so heroic, is a quest in itself: a quest for identity. There are two fights going on here: the fight to identify The Enemy, and the fight to beat him. The second depends on the first. To keep life permanently epic, in fact, the ideal thing would be a struggle where Part 1 had already been gloriously achieved, and Part 2 never could be, because if you beat the enemy, you'd have to look around for another. Consider Iraq: the fact that it's unwinnable is very convenient for anyone who wants to manipulate enemy-centred people - especially since those people are very seldom volunteering to arm up and pay the price themselves. As long as other people are the ones suffering, then an identified, permanent enemy is L&J's comfort zone.

And what happens when you're forced to move out of that comfort zone?

Anybody who managed to stop them seeking out and fighting enemies would be taking away their self-proclaimed heroism, the sense of self that all else rests on. In their limited worldview, if they lost that, what would they have left? They would be dispossessed, broken, conquered.

Peace would be a conquest to them: their desire to have an enemy would have been born down.

[J Neo Marvin]

The idea that love is something one says or feels (passionately and sincerely), rather than something one does, is a widespread confusion shared by many people who have never even heard of this book.

Excellent point. I've often thought that we'd all be better off if we treated "love" less like a noun, and more like a verb.

[Robb]

LaHaye must be terrified in Amish country

Well, from the pacifist angle, certainly, but the ultra conservative, patriarchal nature of the society would be something that appeals to him.

Ah, but then - they're pretty harshly against materialism, and LaHaye is not averse to bling, by all accounts. I can't find it at the moment, but I seem to recall an article a while back discussing the mega-fortune amassed by LaHaye's personal empire (or that may have been in Skipping Towards Armageddon), and how he's living a life of disgusting opulence.

Yeah, he would be petrified to be within a hundred miles of the Amish.

[SchrodingersDuck]

When I first read this, my brain managed to condense "right ear", by losing 4 letters and a space, resulting in some fairly very unpleasant slash-fic imagery, with an unpleasant and confusing gun metaphor. I need brain bleach, stat!

(If you must know and can't figure it out, those 4 letters were "ight". Don't say I didn't warn you)

[Spalanzani]

Ursula L: "And Carpathia just told Stonegal to get on his knees, Stonegal refused, and now Carpathia says "one move and you're dead."

So now, Stonegal is supposed to stay standing?"

Reminds me of Raising Arizona, when John Goodman and the other guy try and rob a bank:

"Everyone freeze! Now get down on the ground!"
*pause*
"Why are you all just standing there?"
"You told us to freeze"

[J Neo Marvin]

Oh gee, by the way I totally put the wrong homepage link on my last post. I'm sure that other blogger is a perfectly nice person, though.

[Praline]

The authors have stated that Nicolae is a pacifist and, according to the rules of this book, that makes him a pacifist even when he's firing a gun into someone's ear.

S.Duck makes an excellent point about disconnecting war with violence. I think there may be another element as well: Nicky's killing a white guy. A guy who speaks English. A guy with, if not a personality, about as close to a personality as characters get in these books.

Soldiering, if you haven't done it, involves knocking over faceless 'enemies' whose fear, pain and right to live don't have to be considered. Killing a guy begging for his life is always horrible - but if you don't have to fight yourself, you don't have to consider that an enemy soldier might be just as frightened as a civilian.

And there's another thing too: soldiers kill on orders. It's the ultimate expression of obedience to authority: not only do you hand over your body, you hand over your conscience, your freedom to make independent decisions about whether someone should live or die. Nicky's not doing that. He's decided for himself who he wants to kill - and he doesn't have orders for it. No one appointed him. Even Rayford and the lads consider they've got orders - from God, no less. But Nicky's not just a killer, he's a freelance killer. That's the problem.

[Nobody_Special]

I'd like to commend LaHaye and Jenkins for being so "in this world, but not of it", that they miss real world examples of a deceiver who came to power preaching peace through law and order, and then stuck a shiv in the backs of the people who supported his rise to power. As someone else pointed out long ago in a very early Left Behind post The Event would be the perfect time for a charismatic, "manly" leader to come forth and promise to protect the remaining people of Earth from this "terror". In the last century the leader of a Large Central European country who rose to power in the 1930's promising to bring order from chaos would be a good person to look at first. Then maybe a Georgian revolutionary who rose to power in an Eastern European country around the same time would be another person to study. Sadly both could teach our authors via history how to create a charismatic ruler who could hold the masses in thrall while being utterly ruthless in liquidating "enemies of the state" to consolidate their power. They might want to look at "The Night of the Long Knives" as an example of eliminating "troublesome" people once they've served their purpose.

And neither of them had to go to The League of Nations and recite a list of the member nations and their leaders.

This passage just shows that the authors and Nicky Appalachia are a group of a two-bit hacks. Real tyrants never have to pull the trigger. Their underlings, or the machinery of the state, do the dirty work so the tyrant can keep his hands nice and clean.

[aunursa]

To LaHaye and Lindsay, all peacemakers were, by definition, false.

I don't understand how this conclusion is reached.

[harmfulguy]

(Poor LaHaye must be terrified in Amish country.)

Where wouldn't LaHaye be terrified? I'm guessing it's a short list.

[Dylan]

I think PMDers who distrust peace see a difference between pacifism on a personal level and pacifism on an international level. Pacifism on a personal level is just weak, but pacifism on an international level is evil. Pacifism on a national level is sort of like communism--it doesn't really work, so it will eventually be subverted to benefit the people in power. The idea may be noble and good, but the implementation will always end up fueling evil. Nicolae is evil because he's just taking this one step further--he's pushing the philosophy because it will eventually gain him power. (The problem, obviously, is that pacifism is fundamentally different than communism--it's an ethical or moral concept on a personal level too, not just a system of running a government.)

Also, I think one of the reasons PMDs distrust pacifists is the same reason they think they're persecuted. Peace requires compromise at best, and squelching dissension at worst. Either of these mean, for example, that they might have to acknowledge people who think differently than they do, or that they can't force their beliefs on other people.

[Jeff Weskamp]

"We've discussed how disappointing it is that the Antichrist's first on-screen kill should involve something as mundane as a handgun. I was hoping for something creepier, something a bit more supernatural or cinematic." -- Fred

One of the creepiest and most cinematic murder scenes I've ever watched is the Blue-Gloved Agents killing the Alliance soldiers in the Firefly episode "Ariel." Man, that was downright blood-curdling!

[Robb]

Where wouldn't LaHaye be terrified? I'm guessing it's a short list.

Apparently, LaHaye lives somewhere in LA - Orange County, I'd guess, but SoCal is where he started, and where he's still based out of.

*****

Soldiering, if you haven't done it

Pardon me for potentially putting a damper on your Whitfieldianly-excellent point, but I'm curious - do you have experience in the military? (I'm not sure of your biographical deets in that respect, and I was a bit curious).

I have no combat experience myself (ROTC was as far as I got), but do have many veteran relatives & acquaintences, and their descriptions of the dehumanizing they have to do in order to be able to survive is pretty much in line with what you said. There can't be a recognition you're ending the life of another person (at least in the moment), otherwise you'll be a total failure as a soldier, and won't live very long.

[Abelardus]

LB Friday is back! Yays!

And now that I have a post on the first page, I can take my sweet time thinking up something meaningful to say.

[Raj]

*GASP!* *GASP!* It's true! It's not a mirage! It really is LB Friday!

[Raj]

Move again and you are dead! Well, you can move a little bit. Yes. Sorry, I didn't mean to be so dogmatic when I came in. Obviously you can all move a little within reason. There are certain involuntary muscular movements which no amount of self-control can prevent. And obviously any assertion of authority on my part, I've got to take that into account ...

[Praline]

Pardon me for potentially putting a damper on your Whitfieldianly-excellent point, but I'm curious - do you have experience in the military? (I'm not sure of your biographical deets in that respect, and I was a bit curious).

I have no combat experience myself (ROTC was as far as I got), but do have many veteran relatives & acquaintences, and their descriptions of the dehumanizing they have to do in order to be able to survive is pretty much in line with what you said. There can't be a recognition you're ending the life of another person (at least in the moment), otherwise you'll be a total failure as a soldier, and won't live very long.

No, I haven't been a soldier; all my experience is of not-being a soldier, like most of the war supporters I'm generalizing about. (I'm not generalizing about soldiers; most of my knowledge is based on reading, so I have no doubt actual soldiers reading this thread could come along and correct anything I said. Though mind you, the only solidier I knew well who'd been in combat was falling apart pretty thoroughly when I knew him, poor soul, so the limited experience I have tallies with what I read about how traumatized combat veterans can endup.)

What I mean is this: if I read a newspaper headline, I have no memories of combat, so I have to exercise my imagination to consider what war must be like for its participants, ie killing actual people. If I don't make that effort, my memories won't do it for me. I think it highly probable that it's the same for other people - and that people who are attached to ideas of heroic combat and patriotism find it more convenient not to stretch their minds to imagine what a nineteen-year-old looks like with half his head blown off. Hence the ease with which fantasists like L&J can separate war and violence: they have no direct experience, and no incentive to bridge the gap with their imaginations.

[SchrodingersDuck]

The more I think about it, the more the line "Move again and you are dead" just doesn't suit Carpathia. So far, we've seen him talk in unsettlingly calm diplomatic pleasantries, even when he is at his most evil (protecting Buck in exchange for quashing the story for instance). I see no reason for him to suddenly slip into common street thug. Far more effect and more chilling would be something like "A grin flickered at the corners of Nicolae's mouth. He straightened, keeping the gun held tight against Stonagal's earlobe and said "Mr. Stonagal, as much as it pains me to say this, I will not think twice about pulling this trigger should you move or otherwise antagonise me", as his finely manicured thumb coolly flicked the switch from 'safe' to 'live'."

Yeah, he would be petrified to be within a hundred miles of the Amish.

The Left Behind novels would completely collapse were the characters Amish - I mean, some of them don't even have phones!

[Raj]

If anyone's interested, the entire movie can be watched for free (the only way that I'll ever partake of any Left Behind product).

[Jeff]

"Move again and you are dead!"

BANG!

"He was breathing!"

[Praline]

Thanks, Raj. Does anyone else hear an odd note of one-upmanship in the title 'Cloud Ten Pictures'? Like, 'You think you're as happy as can be on Cloud Nine, but we're even better!'? And that animation for Namesake Pictures...

[B-W]

To LaHaye and Lindsay, all peacemakers were, by definition, false.

I don't understand how this conclusion is reached.

I also wish the connection were made a bit more explicit before being stated in this particular article, rather than requiring access to really old links and after-the-statement explanations, but here's my understanding of what he's getting at.

LaHaye and Lindsay types cannot comprehend of pacifism being a real possibility. At best, pacifists are idiots who don't know how the world works (i.e., "sometimes you have to fight to keep bad people from hurting you."). At worst (and even more likely), pacifists are liars who don't even believe that "peacemaking" they preach. "Pacifists" in the Vietnam era, for example, would not only (according to these anti-peace types) be perfectly happy to let the communists take over America (just so long as no fighting were required of them), they were actively communists themselves, actively working to subvert the "American way of life." A "true pacifist" can't exist.

The same situation may be said of folks against the Iraq War today. How many times have you heard or seen the phrase "they're on the side of the terrorists"?

If true pacifism is not seen as a possibility for our world, it therefore becomes very easy to see how anyone depicted as a pacifist is working against God's will (and therefore is evil).

[Robb]

Hence the ease with which fantasists like L&J can separate war and violence: they have no direct experience

What's really creepy is that's not quite true - LaHaye apparently was in the Air Force:

In 1944, after finishing night school and attending a Bible institute in Chicago, he enlisted in the Air Force at seventeen and served in Europe as a machine gunner aboard a bomber.

(from here)
But then, if that's what he did, you're right in that his experiences would have been rather detached - it's entirely possible that he never saw a single injury first hand.

I agree with you, though - they certainly dehumanize/sanitize violence in many respects, and the way they glorify it is profoundly disturbing.

[Praline]

Yes, that is creepy. Serves me right for not researching before making statements; thank you for pointing that out. I suspect I'm not wrong in thinking that most of their readers aren't combat veterans, though... :-)

[aunursa]

B-W: I understand the assertion: PMD'ers (and LaHaye in particular) reject the concept of true pacifism. What I'd like to see is some hard evidence to support such an assertion.

[Abelardus]

Praline, from your blog and from your posts here I see that you have a great understanding of storytelling, of archetypes, and of human nature. Also, you humbly admit your lack of experience in some areas, but also show a good amount of research that allows you to concede a point without totally invalidating it.

Does this have anything to do with Fred's post? Not necessarily. Is this a panegyric? Perhaps. But, in addition to Fred's original post, you certainly make every page of comments worth reading.

OK, that should cover my fanboyish adulation.

[Raj]

Poor LaHaye must be terrified in Amish country.

"Greetings, English!"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

[Tlonista]

Delurking to mention that by coincidence, today I discovered John Dear, a Jesuit, pacifist, and radical activist. Which would just blow Tim LaHaye's mind except he probably doesn't think Catholics are Christian.

Side note: I grew up in a fundamentalist-dominated small town and made it out with a very skewed and negative idea of what Christianity is. LB Fridays have played no small part in opening my mind.

[Praline]

Gee, Abelardus, I don't know what to say... Um, thank you! :-)

[Raj]

@Praline: Cloud Ten. An astute observation; I didn't think of it that way. The more I think about it, the more I think you're right (as in "correct", not "Right").

Oh, and congrats to you & Gareth.

[Caravelle]

An entire post based on two sentences?... Awesome!

Fred is afraid of how quickly this is going. After all, even with all the sequels and prequels and movies and video games we're likely to be finished within the millennium !
By slowing down asymptotically however, we might just last until the end of the Universe.

Great post as always ^^

[Hawker Hurricane]

What goes "Clop-clop, clop-clop, clop-clop, clop-clop, BANG! Clop-clop, clop-clop, clop-clop, clop-clop."?
-------
Now, I was a sailor, not a soldier, and the experience is different. The vast majority of sailors will not 'pull the trigger' on a weapon in anger, even in wartime. And of those that do pull triggers, most will do it by pushing a button at a target displayed as a blip on a screen. And even then, it's dehumanized. It's not a airplane with a human crew, it's a "Bandit". Not a ship with hundreds of men aboard, it's a "Skunk". Not a submarine with a crew, it's a "Certsub". This is because normal people don't kill other people. It's easier to make the enemy "not-people" than to train soldiers and sailors to kill people. And with it goes the labeling: Raghead, Charlie, Gook, Kraut, Jap, Hun, Redskin, Reb/Bluebelly, Lobsterback...
-------
Nobody is right, real tyrants never do the dirty work themselves, that's what minions are for. A raised eyebrow, a phrase with a hidden meaning ("Take care of him")... only Hollywierd tyrants do it themselves, usually as part of the "Kick the Dog" trope to prove that, yes, they are evil, why do you ask?

[Caravelle]

B-W: I understand the assertion: PMD'ers (and LaHaye in particular) reject the concept of true pacifism. What I'd like to see is some hard evidence to support such an assertion.

I'm not sure what hard evidence you could get, but in a finite space (which LB, despite its size, is) absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence, so a way to "prove" the assertion could be to show that no where do L&J portray peacemaking as positive.
If peacemaking was something that the Antichrist was misusing for evil purposes, we would expect to see genuine peacemakers at some point as a contrast. If only to show how evil Nicky Are is, perverting those nice people's characteristics.

Up to now the closest thing I've seen to pacifists other than Nicky is the "peace gooooood" zombie world population, not a very positive portrayal at all. Now I haven't read LB so I don't know if such evidence is truly absent, but a lot here have; maybe they could give counterexamples ?

[JMiller]

Best LB Friday since "Martyr Envy".

Aunursa: All peacemakers are Bad Guys, because in order to negotiate for peace, the Good Guys (us) are necessarily going to have to make some free-will-impinging concessions to the Bad Guys (them) which will not actually turn the Bad Guys (them) into Good Guys (us), but will merely give them an opportunity to stew quietly in their Bad Guy juices while we lower our Good Guy defenses by giving them the free-will-impinging concessions that they asked for. Overall, according to this particularly skewed world view, the Good Guys are a blessing to the world and would be morally right in wiping the Bad Guys right off of it to maximize the wonderfulness that the Good Guys bring to the world, with the inverse of not wiping the Bad Guys off the earth being unthinkably immoral and thus further reflecting badly on the peacemakers.

This view, of course, supposes that "If you're not with us, you're against us" and that expecting concessions from "us" means that the negotiator is clearly not entirely with "us." Further supposition is that the Good Guys will not receive any actual concessions from the Bad Guys, just like North Korea kept on building nukes while President Clinton was sending them "flowers and chocolates." Except that they did and it wasn't until the current president refused to engage in "the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited..." that North Korea got back on the nuclear bandwagon, build a test missile, and then demanded rather more severe concessions from us than "flowers and chocolates" which were granted, evidently as a lesson to Iran, that you can be one of us if you just get some nukes.

The only good thing about this frame of mind is that lots of people can all agree on it. Of course, they're using relative definitions of "us" and "them" which can lead to prolonged conflicts...

[Mark]

Fred,

I'm not sure that the rider on the white horse bent on conquest isn't Jesus? After all, Jesus is the conquerer, is the only character featured on a white horse, and comes from heaven with a crown. Certainly the four horsemen in Rev. 6 don't seem to be hellish creatures but rather agents of heaven.

[Caravelle]

I'm not sure that the rider on the white horse bent on conquest isn't Jesus?

Actually, I think it's Pollution ;-)
I'm too lazy to look up the verse, but from what little Revelation I read it always looked like the Antichrist to me.

[Abelardus]

You're quite welcome, Praline.

And to add something to the matter of "soldiery":

I have two older brothers who are in the National Guard. The Eldest has already been to Iraq; the Middle is to be deployed to Afghanistan in the near future. On the one hand, I know they are in the military of their own volition and I am proud of them for that; on the other hand, I do wonder what they think about killing.

Eldest was in a repair unit and, thank God, was never in any danger; Middle was in the same repair unit but transferred over to an active combat unit I believe. Although I admit this sounds impractical, I am not only worried for his life, I am worried he may have to take a life.

But one incident in particular reassures me about Middle: I work as a sacker at a grocery store. Once I was sacking groceries for a boy about my age; he said that he was thinking of joining the army and going to Iraq so he could "shoot some moving targets." A whole mess of words rush into my head to describe him: cantankerous, troublesome, morally weak, ignorant. Anyway I mentioned this to Middle when I got home. He made an indispensable suggestion: This boy should visit a VFW and find out from real soldiers what it's like to experience war and killing. That and much more gives me faith in Middle.

[Praline]

Hoping your family comes home safe, Abelardus...

And thanks, Raj. :-)

[SchrodingersDuck]

I'm too lazy to look up the verse, but from what little Revelation I read it always looked like the Antichrist to me.

It's Revelation 6:2. The rider is never specifically named, and it's far vaguer. In popular depictions, this horseman is taken to be Pestilence, but it's a bit of a stretch: it comes from an offhand mention of plague further down the page. From context, the Antichrist would seem to be the best fit, but a good alternative reading I've heard is that the white horse rider is actually war, and the red horse rider represents rebellion and civil war.

Certainly the four horsemen in Rev. 6 don't seem to be hellish creatures but rather agents of heaven.

I wouldn't say that - red horseman (War) makes people kill each other, black horseman (Famine) overcharges people for grain and pale horseman (Death) is accompanied by the minions of Hell. Not especially holy company.

[Jeff]

Hoping your family comes home safe, Abelardus...

Ditto and likewise.

[stinger]

Abelardus: Best wishes for your brothers' safe return home. I appreciate their service.

[Abelardus]

I apologize if I didn't make this entirely clear, but Eldest is safely home and is doing well. Thank you all just the same for your concern.

[Ecks]

J Neo: I've often thought that we'd all be better off if we treated "love" less like a noun, and more like a verb.

Er... The internet is packed with pictures of people verbing love. Er. But that's not what you meant is it ;)

I'd like to commend LaHaye and Jenkins for being so "in this world, but not of it", that they miss real world examples of a deceiver who came to power preaching peace through law and order, and then stuck a shiv in the backs of the people who supported his rise to power

I can think of another example... Came to power by preaching law'norder and compassion, the lied his way into war and mayhem and even turned on the people who put him there by not banning the only two iddy biddy things they had wanted in the first place... Oh Virtue L&J to stay away from such world weary concerns!

Fred is afraid of how quickly this is going... By slowing down asymptotically however...

By next year posts will be down to disscussion of approximately three words at a time, and by 2014 we'll be up to: "on page 316 there's a comma. L&J apparently believe..."