None of the Above
Mayer, Milton
None of the Above MILTON MAYER A pacifist is a doctrinaire — a man or woman with a doctrine. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, with its sixty-three High Contracting Signatories, renounces war as an...
...At issue in all the issues is not Big Government...
...The pacifist's renunciation of war is a mere consequence of his driving disposition to lead a nonviolent life, in war and in peace...
...if he weren't, he'd be able to prove his case...
...That's where the nonpacifist, or selective, objector has it over the pacifist...
...So the pacifist can't win the argument...
...the nonpacifist objectors probably did as much as the Vietnamese to force an unconditional surrender on the United States...
...But once every dozen wars or so they stand as pat as the pacifist, and the walls come tumbling down...
...He who mounts the wild elephant goes where the wild elephant goes...
...So the pacifist has no one to vote for...
...It never has...
...Hitler has to have someone to fight, or he's finished...
...The campaigners all campaign on the issues — inflation and unemployment and welfare and crime and segregation...
...As a doctrine, pacifism is not just in poor repute...
...I would enlist," said Eugene Debs, "in the war of the workers of the world against the exploiters of the world...
...he renounces it...
...The Mayer-Brown ticket — did I say who my running mate will be...
...He has to overcome anger (including righteous anger), pride, greed, fear, and lust — his own, not his neighbor's...
...Or your life...
...The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, with its sixty-three High Contracting Signatories, renounces war as an instrument of national policy...
...The pacifist can cite the instances of Gandhi and the British or Penn and the Indians, but the nonpacifist says that the historical conditions were inappli-cably different (and he is right...
...Voting is the idlest of obligations of a citizen anyway...
...The pacifist is a socialist, because capitalism is war, setting every man against every other...
...but the nonpacifist says that was only a police action and would the pacifist like to live, right now, in a town that had no police...
...For $105 billion the United States could do just about everything that needs to be done about these social inconveniences, and there isn't much the world couldn't do about them for $300 billion...
...The pacifist, with no one to vote for, is the only voter who understands what Leo Szilard was talking about...
...Two things...
...in most of the world, and in all of the tyrannies, almost everybody votes and the war goes on and on...
...This is the whole work of his and, come to think of it, everyone else's whole life, and it is never finished...
...he is trying to be something more than he has always seemed to be...
...But neither, apparently, has the nonpacifist — not if the predictions are correct that a majority of the American voters aren't taking the trivial trouble to vote in the November 2 election...
...But the pacifist objects to war, period...
...No one to vote for...
...Jerry Brown is not a doctrinaire pacifist, but he has the right idea about money...
...So step up and vote the cheap doctrinaire ticket...
...I selected Jerry for my running mate when somebody asked him why he was so stingy and Jerry said, "I'm not stingy...
...That misadventure got Leo to thinking...
...Leo was the man who wrote the letter that Einstein sent to Roosevelt and got the atomic bomb rolling...
...The reason it is in no repute is that it is a Milton Mayer is the Roving Editor of The Progressive...
...The world is interested in issues...
...they all want a big enough (that is, a still bigger) army...
...And then, before the week is out, I will veto the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924...
...The pacifist can only cavil at their effectiveness by pointing out that the United States is a more monstrous war machine in 1976 than it was in 1972...
...He can disprove his opponent's claim that there ever has been such a thing as a just war in the sense of an innocent individual's defense against an unprovoked assault by an individual criminal...
...Or your money...
...We should inform Stalin," said Leo, "that if he makes one more aggressive move, we'll blow ourselves up...
...The socialist — not to be confused with the Socialist, still less with the Communist — is a pacifist because war, all war, is the murder of the laboring poor and the burning of their bread...
...Of the $300 billion the world spends on war — in time of peace — the United States spends $105 billion and, in addition, sells more weapons of death, to all comers, than all the rest of the world together...
...My running mate will be the Born Again Druid Governor of California, Jerry Brown...
...And that comes to the same thing...
...The Socialists object to this or that capitalist imperialist war...
...Or could, if only his opponent were not a True Believer himself...
...To lead a nonviolent life he has got to be a nonviolent man...
...I'm just cheap...
...Middleton Murray, an Englishman, put it the way an Englishman would put it...
...Mostly the nonpacifist objectors are swept away by the frenzy and the fury, as nearly all of the European and American Socialists were in 1914 and 1917 and England's Peace Pledge Union in 1939...
...He can only prove that his opponent loses it...
...it is in no repute at all...
...Abortion, now, is a doctrinal question, on the Roman Catholic side, and the campaigners all thank God that it's the Supreme Court's fetus...
...Leo was a nonpacifist, but he was a Hungarian, and it takes a Hungarian to put the pacifist challenge that way...
...He isn't able to prove his case against the nonpacifist who says, "What would you do if...
...Nonsense...
...He can disprove his opponent's claim that winning a world war makes the world safe for democracy — or preserves any one of the Four Freedoms...
...He has never had anybody to vote for...
...doctrine, and the world is not interested in doctrine...
...The pacifist can cite President Truman's assertion, after Hiroshima, that "there must never be another war" and then go on to observe that within five years Truman decided to have just one more for the road...
...First, I will pardon myself for refusing to pay the 50 per cent of my income tax that goes to war...
...Jerry, who doesn't like waste, will be against war when he realizes that war is not only a waste but the waster of every human necessity...
...He doesn't argue about it, any more than the Kellogg-Briand Pact does...
...But the pacifist is first of all a True Believer...
...Segregation of course raises buried questions of doctrine, and the campaigners fondly hope that the Court will get that tarbaby off their backs...
...What the pacifist can do is disprove the nonpacifist's case, but that doesn't help either, because the nonpacifist too is a True Believer...
...No matter that the doctrinaire pacifist has the prophets on his side...
...Vote for me...
...He can demonstrate the historical fallacy of Ford's (and Roosevelt's, and Wilson's, and Lincoln's, and Jefferson's, and Washington's) assertion that "preparedness preserves peace...
...When I was asked, as a pacifist lad, "What would you have done if you'd been in the White House on December 7, 1941...
...At issue is the cost of doing something about the social inconveniences of inflation, unemployment, welfare, and so on...
...It didn't help...
...There's a wholesome little movement afoot that wants the ballot to read: FOR PRESIDENT ? Tweedledee ? Tweedledum ? None of the above Plutarch says the ancient Asians fell under tyranny because they could not pronounce the one word No...
...Not if he can help it...
...And any candidate who objected to war — or suggested that the Pentagon budget be cut by more than 5 per cent — would be lynched by a joint posse of Big and Little Capital and Labor...
...Then, in 1948, while the Americans still had a monopoly on the Big Boy, Stalin started snatching all of eastern (and some of western) Europe, and somebody asked Leo what he thought we should do...
...He isn't...
...Unlike General Sherman, I will accept if I am nominated and serve if I am elected...
...I am told that the Quaker pacifists of the American Friends Service Committee who used to cross and recross the land preaching pacifist doctrine now preach against the B-l bomber, just like Common Cause and the other nonpacifist agencies...
...It takes a pacifist to understand a Hungarian like Middleton Murray...
...Saying, "Hell, no, I won't go," but usually without the "hell," he will not injure a fellow man for any reason or under any pretext...
...Don't throw your vote away...
...I am in favor of shedding as much blood as is absolutely necessary in order to emancipate the people...
...the nonpacifist has the passions on his...
...I used to say, "I would have vetoed the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924...
...In 1939 he said, "If England refused to fight, Germany would collapse...
...pacifism isn't...
...So the pacifist has nobody to vote for this, or any other, time around...
...There are differences between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter (and between Eugene McCarthy and Lester Maddox), but unilateral disarmament isn't one of them...
...the pacifist renounces war as an instrument of personal policy...
...He is currently based in California...
...And like Jimmy Carter I will do something significant in my first week in office...
...Then, in July 1945, before Hiroshima, Leo tried to stop the bomb, but it was rolling too fast...
...The B-l bomber is an issue...
...War," said Clemenceau, "is not the worst of evils, but it is the cause of all the others...
...The pacifist is a moral absolutist while the selective objector is a realist, taking men "as they are" and making a political decision from war to war...
Vol. 40 • November 1976 • No. 11
