Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
PACIFIST OR JUST "ANTI-WAR"?
As you might have noticed, I’ve just been reading a reissue of Archibald Baxter’s We Will Not Cease, often regarded as the most influential statement of pacifism ever to have been made by a New Zealander. And inevitably, writing as a non-pacifist, it set me thinking about what real pacifism is. To be genuinely a pacifist, one has to believe that physical force is wrong under all circumstances and in the advancement of all causes. This means that violence can never be used. I admire people like Archibald Baxter and Mark Briggs who were really capable of living out this belief and who went through considerable suffering because of it. It took great courage. But I am still not persuaded to be a pacifist.
Why?
First let me state clearly it’s not because one of my brothers (now deceased) was a career army officer and another spent twenty years in the air force. Two more of my brothers were committed peaceniks who took part in anti-war demos etc. Brothers can remain on cordial terms even if they have different views and I wasn’t swung radically in either direction.
The crudest, but most compelling, argument against pacifism I first encountered was when I was a teenager and read Hilaire Belloc’s aphorism: “Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight / But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.” (Please don’t bother telling me that Belloc was a bit of an anti-Semite. I already know that.) Pacifism would be fine in a world where everyone had the same commitment to peace. But that is not the world we live in. Some people really are belligerent and violent and – as history has shown again and again – whole nations can be persuaded to go to war, even on the flimsiest of pretexts. There are a lot of “roaring Bills” around, and they are not conducive to sweet reason or any other non-violent form of pacification.
And, of course, when there is violence – or mass violence – many people are hurt. The pacifist would argue that by being a pacifist he or she is setting an example which others will come to follow. But when violence is released, it cannot be controlled by doing nothing. The most committed pacifist might be willing to bear, unflinchingly, blows, torture and even death. But, by natural and wholly justifiable instinct, the overwhelming majority of people would not. And in a real situation of war or massive civil upheaval, when real people are being hurt, applied violence is often the only option to halt a conflict, and is the only way of protecting the innocent. (Your city is being bombed? Oh well, let it be bombed. We don’t want to use force to stop the bombing, do we?) In a way, I am repeating one of those bullying questions that military boards threw at conscientious objectors in the First World War such as “What would you do if you saw an enemy soldier raping your sister?” Lytton Strachey’s smug reply was "I should try to interpose my body". Not only was this a “camp” joke (understood as such by Strachey’s Bloomsbury pals who snickered over it) but it was also a rather inane response. To “interpose your body”, passively and without retaliating in such a violent situation, would probably mean the violent soldier would first kill you and then rape your sister. If you were genuinely a pacifist – one who eschews violence in all cases – you would not be able to protect innocents and non-combatants who were under attack.
Strachey’s flippant comment looks in the direction of “passive resistance” or “passive non-cooperation” or civil disobedience. To overcome injustice, to (metaphorically) fight against evil, all you have to do is (in Jesus’ phrase) “turn the other cheek”, go limp, and by your moral example shame the rest of society into changing their ways and overcoming injustice. We are often given the example of Mahatma Gandhi’s “satyagraha” or “soul force”, passive resistance in seeking India’s independence, of Martin Luther King’s non-violent marches into the South, or of Parihaka. But there’s a huge proviso hanging over such enterprises. Civil disobedience and passive resistance work only in societies where there is some rule of law and a press or mass media uncensored enough to report sit-downs, marches and other peaceful dissent. “Satyagraha” worked because in both Britain and India the press was able to report such dissent and help build up sympathy and agreement with Gandhi’s cause. Many in England (especially in the working classes) were on Gandhi’s side. Likewise in America there was already a growing Civil Rights movement and television cameras to report to the nation what happened when King’s marchers faced “Bull” Connor’s dogs and water cannons. In both cases, the pacifistic tactics would have meant little and had very little impact if they weren’t able to be made public. (My own researches tell me that there was only one newspaper in 19th century New Zealand that supported Te Whiti’s enterprise, and that was a newspaper with very limited reach. Parihaka was of course destroyed.) Take away some openness in a society, and pacifist tactics of civil disobedience have very little effect. Try Satyagraha in a fascist, communist or otherwise tyrannical or totalitarian state and see how you fare. Pacifistic demonstrators will be shot, their actions will not be reported, and their memory will be expunged. The massacre in Tiananmen Square didn’t happen, according to official People’s Republic of China teaching. It was merely a fabrication made up by subversive Western journalists.
On all these matters, I am reminded irresistibly of an exchange of polemical poems you will find in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse edited by Philip Larkin. In the middle of the Second World War the pacifist poet Alex Comfort wrote, under a pseudonym, a long broadside ridiculing the old imperialist Winston Churchill and his rhetoric of “blood, sweat and tears”, ridiculing the propaganda techniques encouraging the nation to support the war, and lamenting the way the nation had become militarised. In reply George Orwell, who was no great admirer of imperialist Churchill, wrote an equally long broadside, called “From one non-combatant to another” pointing out why exactly the war was being fought and what sort of enemy was being engaged. Brutally but truthfully Orwell said the choice was “Blood, Toil and Sweat or ‘Kiss the Nazi’s bum’ ”. Quite.
There is another matter related to pacifism which concerns me. This is a certain sort of pseudo-pacifism which passes itself off as pacifism. It involves people who are “anti-war”, but are ardently opposed to a war only so long as the war in question is one of which they disapprove.
To give the two classic cases from New Zealand.
In the First World War, some prominent members of the recently-formed Labour Party were completely opposed to conscription, spoke out against the war, and even served prison terms for their beliefs. In the Second World War, some of the very same men were now cabinet ministers in the Labour government, supervising conscription and enforcing strict penalties for conscientious objectors. In fairness, these men had never said they were pacifists (indeed, in their younger days some of them had been fairly revolutionary in their views). They were opposed to the First World War because they saw it as a mere struggle between capitalist and imperial powers which penalised the working classes. The Second World War was a different matter. But they were still “anti-war” only in one particular circumstance.
More devious was New Zealand’s relatively insignificant Communist Party. When Britain and France sold out the Czechs at Munich in 1938, the communists loudly protested that these capitalist governments had not stood up to Hitler. But then Hitler and Stalin made a “non-aggression pact” (i.e. an alliance) in 1939. So when war broke out, the communists suddenly became anti-war. To their own party members, they said the war with Hitler was merely a squabble between capitalist nations. To society at large they claimed to be pacifists opposed to the horrors of war. (A distorted account of these manoeuvres may be found in Elsie Locke’s not-entirely-truthful book Peace People.) But then – guess what – in 1941 Adolf double-crossed his good buddy Joe and invaded the Soviet Union. Suddenly the communists (not just in New Zealand but in all countries that had a CP) made a quick volte-face and became ardent proponents of war. There never was any real pacifism in the communist movement, but so-called “peace movements”, sponsored by the USSR, persisted through the 1950s, always very selective about the causes they wanted to be “peaceful” about and always advancing the cause of Soviet foreign policy.
“Anti-war”, then, is not true pacifism. In some senses, it is simply tactical.
And yet I would readily agree with the idea that some wars are not worth fighting.
There was much “anti-war” feeling during the Vietnam war, and I am old enough to remember being in the quad of the University of Auckland’s Student Union and hearing fiery debates on the subject. In one case, I remember a student challenging a platform speaker opposed to American and New Zealand involvement and arguing that leaders of both countries were “warmongers”. The student shouted “Aren’t the Vietcong warmongers too?” To which the platform speaker shouted back “You don’t know the difference between a people’s revolutionary war of liberation and an imperialist war.” And oddly enough, I agreed with her answer even if I thought her views were simplistic. Whether she realised it or not, she was actually taking the “just war” position.
Some wars are justifiable. Others aren’t.
Over the centuries, the “just war” theory has gone through many modifications and has been supported in various forms by religious, agnostic and atheist ethicists and philosophers in many cultures. It has of course been hard for religious thinkers to accept this theory, given that the founders of most religions were seen as advocates of peace. It is quite clear, for example, that for the first three centuries of their existence, Christians were devotedly pacifist, refusing to serve in Roman armies and taking very seriously the statement from the Sermon on the Mount “blessed are the peace-makers”. Jesus’ teachings were against violence, even if he did physically attack the money-lenders in the temple and he did make that ambiguous statement, argued over ever since, “I did not come to bring peace but the sword” (Matt.10:34). But then Christians became the largest body of people in Europe, kings and emperors were now Christian, and things changed. War was already, and continued to be, a reality. How to justify it. Thus, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and on to non-Christian ethicists, the “just war” theory developed. Despite all the modifications it has had over the centuries, it still seems to me the most robust approach to war. As I now understand it, the theory says wars should only be waged in self-defence, to forestall a tyrant who is about to attack, to punish a guilty enemy (rather dodgy that one) and only if the war can be won. No point whatsoever to wage war with a power that will inevitably crush you.
Is this a perfect solution to the problem of war? No. But it’s the best we can hope for in an imperfect world.
Perhaps by this stage, if you are a real pacifist and not merely “anti-war”, you will imagine that I am a blood-thirsty warmonger revelling in chaos, bloodshed and mass destruction. Nope. I am a non-military person, I have never wanted to be a serviceman of any sort and I have never borne arms (as well as now being too old to do so anyway.) If you think that negotiation and diplomacy are a better way to settle international conflicts, I am on board… but with the reminder that negotiation and diplomacy do not always work. If you think it is good to have a society that is not heavily militarised, I am again on board… unless you really are involved in a war. If you are involved in “peace studies” no problem… but in your teaching please recount history truthfully and not merely as a prop for your ideology.
Like you, I like the idea of a war-less, conflict-less, violence-free world. But I live in this world. So I am still not a pacifist.
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