I apologise for getting involved in this thread, it was stupid, and won't happen again. I was responding to the remarks about Gandhi and the Buddhists in Vietnam, and, as LEJ says, making a point about non-violence, which is about rising above the "weapons of your oppressors", whatever that rhetoric means in the context of blowing up innocents wherever, in Israel, South Africa, Ireland, Canada. The idea of attacking innocents is either to win attention for your cause, or to succumb to Maoist rhetoric about how all the "forces" of the oppressor are acceptable targets. In either case your moral strength is lost, which is the only real weapon of the weaker innocent against the superior capacity for violence of armies. Once you move into violence, you are your enemy.
The forces involved in that situation all turned into their enemy, they all behaved like vicious bastards, they turned into scorpions in a bottle, stinging each other into frenzies, and dragged each other down into the depths of depravity. Anyone on any side who isn't ashamed of what their own people did in the name of high-sounding ideals and military rhetoric learned nothing.
yours, Peter T.