Pacifism
Everyone wants to talk about peace. The problem is, there are probably few concepts of human civilisation that are more cliched, and less understood, than peace. It’s the ultimate motherhood statement -- people say ‘peace is good’, and what can you do but nod and agree? But if everyone agrees that peace is good, then it might help to try and figure out ‘what the hell is ‘peace’ anyway?’
Peace is most simply defined as ‘the absence of war’. But when the P-word is used by pacifists today, it’s not merely describing an absence of something bad. No, the P-word is a grand, all-encompasing positive. It means all good things to all good people. It’s a utopian place where all flowers bloom, and nobody suffers. Therefore, if the definition of peace is ‘the absence of war’, all we have to do to make everything good in the world is just avoid declaring war.
This is of course is silly to a degree that would require foul language to describe properly.
Chairman Mao managed to kill 40-million-plus people while China was at peace. Stalin managed a respectable 20-million in the Soviet Union. Idi Amin stuck his oar in for the cause in Uganda, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and there are countless other atrocities littering humanity’s recent and not-so-recent history all committed under the rose-coloured umbrella of peace. Ask the residents of Dafur how pleased they are that their nation is at ‘peace’. Chances are you couldn’t ask them even if you went there -- most of them have fled their homes, or are dead.
And even more, there are far worse things that governments can do to their people than go to war. For one, they can ignore them. Countless governments are doing just this in Africa, siphoning all the nation’s wealth into their personal Swiss bank accounts, leaving those nations open to health epidemics for which they can’t afford the preventions or cures, or for mass-starvation. War has played an important role in deepening Africa’s misery, but it’s merely one pillar of a multi-pronged African government effort to keep their people poor, suffering and hopeless. War in this context therefore falls under the banner of ‘bad government’, which is surely the greatest cause of human misery in the world today... but it’s the starvation and disease, frequently exacerbated by war, that causes most of the deaths, more than actual bombs and bullets.
Most pacifists today seem to be people who believe in the grander, rosier usage of the P-word, and the concept that if we can all just desist from violence, then everyone will be happy. But how will peace benefit a starving African whose kleptocratic leaders are more concerned with private yachts than relieving poverty? How will it benefit one of the hundreds of thousands toiling and dying in North Korea’s gulags?
All too often we hear pacifists and their motherhood statements, saying things like, “we all need to learn to tolerate and respect one another.” Let’s examine this statement for a moment. Do we really need to all tolerate and respect one another? What about all the people who don’t deserve tolerance or respect? What about the terrorists? What about the mass murderers, the dictators, the pedophiles? The problem with pacifist motherhood statements is that they presume there’s nothing in the world worth fighting for, or worth fighting against. I think there’s probably only two kinds of people who might believe such a thing -- people who are perpetually stoned, or people who know nothing about (or have chosen to ignore) the kinds of nasty things that go on in the world. Or who simply don’t care.
Now, how one chooses to fight the world’s evils is another question. For most of them, war is not the answer. Serial killers are a law-enforcement problem... unless they happen to be presidents of nations, in which case they may well require a war. Ditto pedophiles. In many situations, war would be too costly a solution for the problem at hand -- like in North Korea, a nation run by a regime that most assuredly deserves the worst that modern military technology can contrive to drop on their heads. But the North Korean reply would at the least be a massive artillery barrage on Seoul, and quite possibly a nuclear warhead on Tokyo, thus making the exercise, from a western perspective, unprofitable.
Sadly, the spread of pacifist ideology is counterproductive to the very state of the world pacifists claim to be working toward. The reason is quite simple -- the pacifists have fixated upon the wrong problem. A pacifist worldview perceives that humanity’s greatest problem is man’s inhumanity to man. Or in other words, the kind of hate-filled bigotry that leads to racist violence, ethnic cleansing and, occasionally, genocide. Pacifists put forward that we, the developed world, should occupy the moral high-ground, and lead by example. If we set this example, the theory goes, the rest of the world will follow, hatred and violence will vanish from the world, and everything will be okay.
The problem, of course, is that everything won’t be okay. People need to eat. People need clean drinking water. People need political expression, and religious expression, and to belong to particular tribal groups, whether these groups be actual tribes, or nations, or ethnic groups or whatever. These things won’t disappear if all the westerners suddenly become pacifists. These aspects of human civilisation are the root causes of violence. Violence comes at the end of the chain, not the front, and if you’re going to eliminate violence, you have to deal with all the other issues first. As such, pacifists have put the cart before the horse.
But many pacifists seem blind to the root causes of war. And so it’s no surprise that pacifism in many ways has become the ideology of comfortable ignorance. One can know nothing about the world, and nothing about the very unavoidable concerns of very real people that sometimes express themselves in violence, and fool oneself into thinking you’re doing something about it by advocating pacifism. Or worse, pacifism frequently becomes the adopted standard of western self-haters, isolationists and racists, who have no problem at all with other people killing each other in large numbers, just so long as we don’t participate, even to try and stop the slaughter.
Many ‘do-nothing’ pacifists don’t even seem to understand the history of the movement, pointing to practitioners like Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi as people who never, ever picked a fight, and were not interested in using force to change the world. This is of course absolutely wrong. King and Gandhi used force all the time, just not violent force. For both of them (though Gandhi came first, and his example was King’s inspiration) pacifism was a weapon. Both were entirely explicit about this in their writings and speeches.
Gandhi’s aim was to rid India of the British Empire. He was a warrior in his cause as surely as any guerilla or freedom fighter. He targeted the British where they were most vulnerable -- in their own, precious sense of self-righteousness and moral superiority. This was, after all, the only moral justification for a few tens of thousands of white people to be ruling a nation of 300 million Indians -- the firm belief that British rule was morally superior to the native version, and that if the British withdrew, the local alternative would be savagery. Gandhi was fortunate, in this regard, that his nation’s occupiers were a people as obsessed with their own sense of ‘proper and moral conduct’ as the British were. Indeed, their entire empire rested on the principle -- ‘the white man’s burden’, as Kipling put it.
Gandhi’s supporters refused to cooperate with British law, and made a general pain-in-the-ass of themselves in doing so. When the British responded with force, and the Indians did not fight back (despite every provocation), Gandhi turned the entire moral equation on its head -- suddenly it was the British who were violent savages, and the locals who were paragons of moral enlightenment. Confronted with such a picture, and with a great many British themselves conceding to this new reason, the Raj was doomed.
Martin Luther King also fought a similar battle for civil rights in America. Both mens’ strategy would surely have earned the respect of many successful military commanders through history -- both achieved their objectives, with much loss, suffering and personal sacrifice, and both displayed a personal courage and selflessness in the pursuit of their respective causes that the bravest soldier in battle could only admire. These men pursued an aggressive pacifism, a pacifism designed to confront evils, and defeat them, forcibly. This was pacifism as an active alternative to violence -- that is to say, a pacifism that could achieve the same objectives as a violent struggle might aim to achieve, but do so more effectively by capturing the moral high ground.
Today’s pacifists, sadly, don’t seem to be terribly interested in solving humanity’s problems. Most of them hail from nations that are basically peaceful, and where there are no great ills of colonialism or racist segregation to be fought against and overcome. One defining feature of both Gandhi and King, after all, was that they were struggling for themselves, and their own people, and their own nation, first and foremost. Both advocated exporting their strategies, but that came later.
Safe in their comfortable cocoons, today’s pacifists seem more determined than anything to simply stop anyone else from trying to solve the world’s problems either. They had no solution to Saddam Hussein’s genocides. They have no solution Kim Jong Il’s gulags. One suspects that if Gandhi were here, he’d tell today’s pacifists that if they wanted to be taken seriously, they’d have to offer a reasonable alternative to warfare. They’d have to demonstrate that pacifism could be just as powerful and effective as military might. No doubt he’d have instructed today’s pacifists to stage sit-in blockades around Iraq’s embassies, to stage major rallies against Saddam’s massacres, to walk barefoot across the Iraqi border, into the captivity of Saddam’s forces, to use their own plight in his jails and torture chambers as political leverage to force Saddam to back down. If they’d been successful, and Saddam had backed down, maybe Gandhi’s pacifism could have won, and the current Iraq war would have been avoided.
But instead, today’s pacifists targeted all their activities against the Americans. Not Saddam. I think Gandhi would have been dismayed. He wouldn’t have liked the war in Iraq either, but I doubt he’d have let Saddam so completely off the hook.
But if Gandhi were here today, I think his greatest dismay would be reserved for the Palestinians. I mean surely, if there is a single oppressed group in the world today who could have benefited from Gandhi’s teachings, it’s the unhappy residents of Palestine. All the ingredients are there -- a just cause, a mass struggle involving common people instead of massed armies, and the collective eyes of the world media. Best of all, the Palestinians face an opponent that is democratic, civilised, and very conscious of, and sensitive to, moral debate and persuasion. If Israeli citizens were faced with images on their TV screens every night of masses of Palestinian protesters blocking roads, breaching fences, and generally being as disruptive as possible without violence, and simply daring the Israeli soldiers to shoot them, the occupation of the West Bank would collapse within months. Every killed, beaten or arrested Palestinian would only prove the comparative immorality of Israel, as those Palestinian losses would be accepted without violence in return. Given Israel’s history, I can’t see how the nation could accept such a self-image for any length of time. Popular support for the hardline settlers would have collapsed long ago, and the Palestinians would have their state, and for a small fraction of the grief and loss they’ve suffered.
Instead, the Palestinians chose not merely violence, but some of the worst, depraved, immoral and barbarous forms of violence imaginable. Instead of elevating their moral claim, they’ve dragged it through the mud, driven masses of Israelis very predictably toward their own hard-liners, and altered the moral equation so that many Israelis feel perfectly justified in any return violence they send the Palestinians’ way. Let’s just say the Palestinians made a bad strategic decision in how to go about addressing their very real, but now dimly remembered (by the rest of the world), grievances.
It’s not merely the western protesters who have forgotten what militant pacifism was all about. Gandhi and King were not telling people not to fight -- they were advocating an alternative form of warfare. Both men, I’m sure, would be very sad to have known how soon their ideas would vanish from the collective political memory.
Peace is most simply defined as ‘the absence of war’. But when the P-word is used by pacifists today, it’s not merely describing an absence of something bad. No, the P-word is a grand, all-encompasing positive. It means all good things to all good people. It’s a utopian place where all flowers bloom, and nobody suffers. Therefore, if the definition of peace is ‘the absence of war’, all we have to do to make everything good in the world is just avoid declaring war.
This is of course is silly to a degree that would require foul language to describe properly.
Chairman Mao managed to kill 40-million-plus people while China was at peace. Stalin managed a respectable 20-million in the Soviet Union. Idi Amin stuck his oar in for the cause in Uganda, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and there are countless other atrocities littering humanity’s recent and not-so-recent history all committed under the rose-coloured umbrella of peace. Ask the residents of Dafur how pleased they are that their nation is at ‘peace’. Chances are you couldn’t ask them even if you went there -- most of them have fled their homes, or are dead.
And even more, there are far worse things that governments can do to their people than go to war. For one, they can ignore them. Countless governments are doing just this in Africa, siphoning all the nation’s wealth into their personal Swiss bank accounts, leaving those nations open to health epidemics for which they can’t afford the preventions or cures, or for mass-starvation. War has played an important role in deepening Africa’s misery, but it’s merely one pillar of a multi-pronged African government effort to keep their people poor, suffering and hopeless. War in this context therefore falls under the banner of ‘bad government’, which is surely the greatest cause of human misery in the world today... but it’s the starvation and disease, frequently exacerbated by war, that causes most of the deaths, more than actual bombs and bullets.
Most pacifists today seem to be people who believe in the grander, rosier usage of the P-word, and the concept that if we can all just desist from violence, then everyone will be happy. But how will peace benefit a starving African whose kleptocratic leaders are more concerned with private yachts than relieving poverty? How will it benefit one of the hundreds of thousands toiling and dying in North Korea’s gulags?
All too often we hear pacifists and their motherhood statements, saying things like, “we all need to learn to tolerate and respect one another.” Let’s examine this statement for a moment. Do we really need to all tolerate and respect one another? What about all the people who don’t deserve tolerance or respect? What about the terrorists? What about the mass murderers, the dictators, the pedophiles? The problem with pacifist motherhood statements is that they presume there’s nothing in the world worth fighting for, or worth fighting against. I think there’s probably only two kinds of people who might believe such a thing -- people who are perpetually stoned, or people who know nothing about (or have chosen to ignore) the kinds of nasty things that go on in the world. Or who simply don’t care.
Now, how one chooses to fight the world’s evils is another question. For most of them, war is not the answer. Serial killers are a law-enforcement problem... unless they happen to be presidents of nations, in which case they may well require a war. Ditto pedophiles. In many situations, war would be too costly a solution for the problem at hand -- like in North Korea, a nation run by a regime that most assuredly deserves the worst that modern military technology can contrive to drop on their heads. But the North Korean reply would at the least be a massive artillery barrage on Seoul, and quite possibly a nuclear warhead on Tokyo, thus making the exercise, from a western perspective, unprofitable.
Sadly, the spread of pacifist ideology is counterproductive to the very state of the world pacifists claim to be working toward. The reason is quite simple -- the pacifists have fixated upon the wrong problem. A pacifist worldview perceives that humanity’s greatest problem is man’s inhumanity to man. Or in other words, the kind of hate-filled bigotry that leads to racist violence, ethnic cleansing and, occasionally, genocide. Pacifists put forward that we, the developed world, should occupy the moral high-ground, and lead by example. If we set this example, the theory goes, the rest of the world will follow, hatred and violence will vanish from the world, and everything will be okay.
The problem, of course, is that everything won’t be okay. People need to eat. People need clean drinking water. People need political expression, and religious expression, and to belong to particular tribal groups, whether these groups be actual tribes, or nations, or ethnic groups or whatever. These things won’t disappear if all the westerners suddenly become pacifists. These aspects of human civilisation are the root causes of violence. Violence comes at the end of the chain, not the front, and if you’re going to eliminate violence, you have to deal with all the other issues first. As such, pacifists have put the cart before the horse.
But many pacifists seem blind to the root causes of war. And so it’s no surprise that pacifism in many ways has become the ideology of comfortable ignorance. One can know nothing about the world, and nothing about the very unavoidable concerns of very real people that sometimes express themselves in violence, and fool oneself into thinking you’re doing something about it by advocating pacifism. Or worse, pacifism frequently becomes the adopted standard of western self-haters, isolationists and racists, who have no problem at all with other people killing each other in large numbers, just so long as we don’t participate, even to try and stop the slaughter.
Many ‘do-nothing’ pacifists don’t even seem to understand the history of the movement, pointing to practitioners like Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi as people who never, ever picked a fight, and were not interested in using force to change the world. This is of course absolutely wrong. King and Gandhi used force all the time, just not violent force. For both of them (though Gandhi came first, and his example was King’s inspiration) pacifism was a weapon. Both were entirely explicit about this in their writings and speeches.
Gandhi’s aim was to rid India of the British Empire. He was a warrior in his cause as surely as any guerilla or freedom fighter. He targeted the British where they were most vulnerable -- in their own, precious sense of self-righteousness and moral superiority. This was, after all, the only moral justification for a few tens of thousands of white people to be ruling a nation of 300 million Indians -- the firm belief that British rule was morally superior to the native version, and that if the British withdrew, the local alternative would be savagery. Gandhi was fortunate, in this regard, that his nation’s occupiers were a people as obsessed with their own sense of ‘proper and moral conduct’ as the British were. Indeed, their entire empire rested on the principle -- ‘the white man’s burden’, as Kipling put it.
Gandhi’s supporters refused to cooperate with British law, and made a general pain-in-the-ass of themselves in doing so. When the British responded with force, and the Indians did not fight back (despite every provocation), Gandhi turned the entire moral equation on its head -- suddenly it was the British who were violent savages, and the locals who were paragons of moral enlightenment. Confronted with such a picture, and with a great many British themselves conceding to this new reason, the Raj was doomed.
Martin Luther King also fought a similar battle for civil rights in America. Both mens’ strategy would surely have earned the respect of many successful military commanders through history -- both achieved their objectives, with much loss, suffering and personal sacrifice, and both displayed a personal courage and selflessness in the pursuit of their respective causes that the bravest soldier in battle could only admire. These men pursued an aggressive pacifism, a pacifism designed to confront evils, and defeat them, forcibly. This was pacifism as an active alternative to violence -- that is to say, a pacifism that could achieve the same objectives as a violent struggle might aim to achieve, but do so more effectively by capturing the moral high ground.
Today’s pacifists, sadly, don’t seem to be terribly interested in solving humanity’s problems. Most of them hail from nations that are basically peaceful, and where there are no great ills of colonialism or racist segregation to be fought against and overcome. One defining feature of both Gandhi and King, after all, was that they were struggling for themselves, and their own people, and their own nation, first and foremost. Both advocated exporting their strategies, but that came later.
Safe in their comfortable cocoons, today’s pacifists seem more determined than anything to simply stop anyone else from trying to solve the world’s problems either. They had no solution to Saddam Hussein’s genocides. They have no solution Kim Jong Il’s gulags. One suspects that if Gandhi were here, he’d tell today’s pacifists that if they wanted to be taken seriously, they’d have to offer a reasonable alternative to warfare. They’d have to demonstrate that pacifism could be just as powerful and effective as military might. No doubt he’d have instructed today’s pacifists to stage sit-in blockades around Iraq’s embassies, to stage major rallies against Saddam’s massacres, to walk barefoot across the Iraqi border, into the captivity of Saddam’s forces, to use their own plight in his jails and torture chambers as political leverage to force Saddam to back down. If they’d been successful, and Saddam had backed down, maybe Gandhi’s pacifism could have won, and the current Iraq war would have been avoided.
But instead, today’s pacifists targeted all their activities against the Americans. Not Saddam. I think Gandhi would have been dismayed. He wouldn’t have liked the war in Iraq either, but I doubt he’d have let Saddam so completely off the hook.
But if Gandhi were here today, I think his greatest dismay would be reserved for the Palestinians. I mean surely, if there is a single oppressed group in the world today who could have benefited from Gandhi’s teachings, it’s the unhappy residents of Palestine. All the ingredients are there -- a just cause, a mass struggle involving common people instead of massed armies, and the collective eyes of the world media. Best of all, the Palestinians face an opponent that is democratic, civilised, and very conscious of, and sensitive to, moral debate and persuasion. If Israeli citizens were faced with images on their TV screens every night of masses of Palestinian protesters blocking roads, breaching fences, and generally being as disruptive as possible without violence, and simply daring the Israeli soldiers to shoot them, the occupation of the West Bank would collapse within months. Every killed, beaten or arrested Palestinian would only prove the comparative immorality of Israel, as those Palestinian losses would be accepted without violence in return. Given Israel’s history, I can’t see how the nation could accept such a self-image for any length of time. Popular support for the hardline settlers would have collapsed long ago, and the Palestinians would have their state, and for a small fraction of the grief and loss they’ve suffered.
Instead, the Palestinians chose not merely violence, but some of the worst, depraved, immoral and barbarous forms of violence imaginable. Instead of elevating their moral claim, they’ve dragged it through the mud, driven masses of Israelis very predictably toward their own hard-liners, and altered the moral equation so that many Israelis feel perfectly justified in any return violence they send the Palestinians’ way. Let’s just say the Palestinians made a bad strategic decision in how to go about addressing their very real, but now dimly remembered (by the rest of the world), grievances.
It’s not merely the western protesters who have forgotten what militant pacifism was all about. Gandhi and King were not telling people not to fight -- they were advocating an alternative form of warfare. Both men, I’m sure, would be very sad to have known how soon their ideas would vanish from the collective political memory.
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