Here's a terrible "syllogism" from a wonderful person, Ray McGovern, longtime CIA employee, then longtime peace activist, and now year-long contender that Russia had no choice but to attack Ukraine.
"The Russians had other options to invading Ukraine.
They attacked Ukraine in a 'war of choice'; also threaten NATO.
Ergo, the West must arm Ukraine to the teeth, risking wider war."
This is supposedly an explanation of the thinking of we believers that Russia had some choice other than to invade Ukraine. In reality, it illustrates a very sad and enormous distance between the thinking of people who once agreed that war was immoral, but who have now spent over a year utterly failing to persuade each other of anything.
Of course the quote above is not a syllogism at all. This is a syllogism:
A threat of war requires war.
Russia is threatened with war.
Russia requires war.
(Or write the same thing substituting Ukraine for Russia.)
But so is this:
A threat of war does not require war.
Russia is threatened with war.
Russia does not require war.
(Or write the same thing substituting Ukraine for Russia.)
The disagreement is over the major premise. The syllogism is not actually a very useful tool for thinking; merely for a primitive sort of thinking about thinking. The world is actually complex, and someone could build a case for this one, too: "A threat of war sometimes requires war, depending." (They'd be wrong.)
That the threat or war, and even actual war, in many cases has not required war in response but been defeated by other means is a matter of record. So the question is whether this time was different from all of those times.
Here's another disagreement. Which of these is true?
"Opposing one side of a war requires defending the other side."
or
"Opposing one side of a war could conceivably be part and parcel of opposing all sides of all wars."
This is a factual question, too, a matter of record. Those of us who have spent all these many months denouncing every war act by both sides of the war in Ukraine can show each side all the accusations we've received of supporting both their side and the other side -- and all the evidence that they are all mistaken.
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