Peace and Revolution
Lewy, Guenter
I n a small jumble of steel and con- 1 crete in the midst of Asia's most dynamic city, Manh Chung Tu waits for a freedom that may never come. Mr. Manh is a Vietnamese in his mid-twenties, one of the...
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...The lessons it contains are of import to pacifists interested in restoring integrity to their movement...
...Nevertheless, a little juggling of his arrangement, along with a tad more attention to the philosophical claims of pacifism, might have helped put the evidence in better perspective...
...Unlike earlier conscientious objectors who had recognized the right of society to make decisions on war and peace but had claimed for themselves the right to refuse to abide by the command to bear arms," says Lewy, "the new 'resisters' engaged in acts of obstruction and even sabotage of the war effort...
...when we justify it for any ends (which is different from understanding the reasons people go to war) we have lost...
...A good part of the new pacifists' problem was their misunderstanding of pacifism itself, a blurring of the lines between personal and public morality...
...Manh and the others all say they'd sooner stay here than go back to Vietnam, willing to wait years in the hopes of that magic ticket to America...
...Over the walls, looped with barbed wire, the tops of the colony's blue-and-cream double-decker buses are just visible...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 43...
...In a way this was almost inevitable...
...In other words, while others have various moral mechanisms to allow for a certain (but not unlimited) use of force in pursuit of a just cause, pacifists rule out questions of goals altogether...
...He has been here William McGurn is deputy editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal and editor of Basic Law, Basic Questions (Review Publishing Co...
...If that is a hard lesson to learn from a book, it is easier than learning it from a bayonet...
...According to Guenter Lewy, they've long since moved on to other things, Central America and South Africa for example...
...The broadest possible alliances are not constructive if they rest on the abandonment of our central belief...
...a bloody stalag," says one PEACE AND REVOLUTION: THE MORAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN PACIFISM Guenter Lewy/William B. Eerdmans/$19.95 William McGurn It's your Country...
...With Vietnam, they became partisans and opened themselves to cooperation with Communists and their friends...
...It wasn't long before NLF flags started flying at American peace rallies...
...Great minds, great opinions In one handy publication —CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE —you get a composite view of national issues from conservative newspaper columnists and cartoonists across the country...
...Whatever you call this, it's not peace...
...Yet Mr...
...Makeshift curtains strung around the sides represent futile efforts at modesty...
...The head of the Indochina program for the American Friends Service Committee, John McAuliffe, likewise suggested in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon that America ought to rethink "the role of Marxist-Leninist ideology in Vietnam's success and consequently its application to our own and other struggles...
...Coming as it does just as Congress quibbles over funding for the Nicaraguan contras and the Democratic party drafts a presidential platform labeling South Africa a "terrorist state," Peace and Revolution makes bracing reading...
...Manh has some 5,137 neighbors, close neighbors you might say, since at Sham Shui Po camp they live in two warehouses filled with row upon row of bunk beds, each bed three levels high, stacked three deep on either side of a center aisle as long as a football field...
...In 1955, Weigel notes, the AFSC published a study called Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence, which did not shy away from the dilemma of power, was resolutely anti-Communist, and recognized that a genuine pacifist movement could lead even non-adherents to pay more attention to nonviolent options...
...This disturbed not a few people, and Peace and Revolution is peppered with complaints, for example, that the AFSC was being increasingly run by non-Quakers often hostile to Quaker principles...
...Warren Brookes Norman Podhoretz Gen...
...a collection of essays about the future of Hong Kong under Peking rule...
...Henry Mohr Don Feder Anthony Lejeune Herb Schmertz Walter Williams Jeffrey Hart Andy Seamans Paul Harvey John Chamberlain William Murchison Evans & Novak William Rusher Dorothy Rabinowitz Charlie Reese And over 20 outstanding cartoonists yourself to find out what they are saying every week...
...The magnitude of Even the brothers Berrigan, whose thoughts and writings confirm the legitimacy of the pejorative "jesuitical," chastised the peace groups for looking at North Vietnam as "an angel of light in comparison with the slouching Western beast...
...So where are the peace workers today...
...Patrick Buchanan George F. Will William F. Buckley, Jr...
...For the American people, Peace and Revolution is a sharp reminder that the public realm has its own special virtues,particularly with regard to the use of force...
...Great reading...
...As George Weigel has put it in Tranquillitas Ordinis, "By witnessing to the truth of how things ought to be pacifism could become a standard for measuring the gap between that moral and political horizon and things as they are...
...In short, the pacifist cannot turn his neighbor's cheek...
...It's all here This 32-page tabloid is devoted entirely to the views of over 24 acclaimed columnists and 20 cartoonists with conservative appeal...
...But a bit more development of this theme early on would have underscored the author's main point, to wit: that the American peace movement not only picked the wrong side in Vietnam, it betrayed its own principles in the process...
...For the American peace movement, it warns that being pure of heart is not enough once the line is crossed into public advocacy...
...By then, of course, it was too late...
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...W by is any of this important today...
...Pacifism is by definition a highly personal option, given that most of us accept that to stand by while the strong bully the weak can itself be criminal...
...T ewy's impressive documentation of these events has to convince even the thickest reader...
...It was these groups and their offspring that defeated funding for the Nicaraguan contras...
...Now there's a convenient way to stay informed on what conservatives say about defense, national debt, education, civil rights, religion, foreign relations and other topics of critical importance...
...Consistently then, they became more assiduous for the victory by their side, which would be a defeat for the system, than for an end to the killing and a transfer of the conflict, which was not all that simple, to the diplomatic arena...
...It is a point we pacifists need to get straight in our thinking...
...A handy reference...
...Apart from these philosophical shifts, there may be an even simpler explanation for the dramatic change in the American peace movement, mirroring the shift in America's mainstream churches, universities, and unions: the change in the kind of people who led these groups...
...Shouldn't you know what leading writers say in the CONSERVATIVE CHRONICLE...
...bases there—this despite the overwhelmingly pro-American stance of the Filipino people...
...War is our first enemy...
...Date Name Address THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 41 British official visiting the site...
...Prior to 1965, American pacifists had been careful to steer clear of any cooperation with Communists, and their principled refusal to distinguish between lawful and unlawful uses of force led them even to deny the legitimacy of the war against Hitler, as abhorrent as they held Nazism to be...
...Once the emphasis was shifted from nonviolence to the establishment of a socialist order, the slope was slippery enough for advocates to slide easily into the propagandist role...
...Not surprisingly, these same groups were the last to criticize the newly installed Commungt regimes in Indochina even after evidence of the reeducation camps and killing fields became overwhelming...
...This in turn set up a "conflict of loyalties between the pacifists' ideals of nonviolence and their aspirations to liberate the exploited and oppressed...
...It was such reasoning that reconciled Augustine to the duties of Roman citizenship, the great saint seeing the end as a "just order" rather than the mere absence of conflict...
...To be sure, in the very first sentence Lewy correctly defines pacifism as "the doctrine of those who are morally opposed to bearing arms and who refuse to sanction war for any purpose, defensive or otherwise...
...You'll enjoy their uncompromising candor...
...In 1967, for example, A. J. Muste, a leader of the War Resisters League, argued that "politically sophisticated pacifists" had to distinguish "between the violence of liberation movements (of people who, in a situation where they have no real possibility of democratic means, resort to violence) and the violence imposed on these countries by imperialist powers, for example, the violence which the United States is carrying out in Vietnam at the present time...
...In his latest book, Peace and Revolution, Lewy charts how American pacifism moved from a principled repudiation of the use of arms to a whorish endorsement of armed struggle on behalf of some of the world's most brutal Communist insurgencies...
...Instead, they directed their energy at undermining the credibility of refugees bearing reports of persecution as well as those in their own movement with enough integrity to acknowledge that something had gone horribly wrong.this claim needs to be fully taken in before the seriousness of what happened in Vietnam can be appreciated...
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...A good example was Alfred Hassler, who in 1973, after almost a decade of futile opposition to the change, put his finger squarely on the issue at stake: A good many people in the movement, seeing the origins of the Indochina war in "the system," and recognizing that the institution of war will not be eliminated until the system is changed, let their logic drift into the untenable conclusion that the killing in Indochina could not be ended until the system, especially in the United States, was changed...
...The reason, says Lewy, is that the American peace movement was interested not so much in peace as in a unilateral American withdrawal that would "in effect make sure that the war would go on until the NLF and the North Vietnamese had achieved their objectives...
...policymakers responding to similar pressure in troublespots from El Salvador to South Korea today...
...Perhaps there's another book in this which might also ask why the driving force of the new movement, even more than the commitment to "national liberation," was a hatred of American democracy...
...Manh is a Vietnamese in his mid-twenties, one of the thousands of boat people to wash up on Hong Kong's shores in recent years...
...Jus, took at the list of distinguished writers — great minds with great opinions...
...By the time Vietnam rolled around, it was painfully clear that the commitment to socialism outweighed the commitment to nonviolence, much as church elites found that this same commitment outweighed their religious doctrine...
...Back in Vietnam, there are reports of famine in the North, skirmishes with the Cambodian resistance (including the murderous Khmer Rouge), and an outflow of refugees now at its largest level in years...
...If ever it does so, it will have to acknowledge its debt to these more traditional ethicists...
...It is not in the interests of the American people to oppose socialist/communist revolutions in other countries...
...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 Given the inevitable tension of such a challenge, pacifism is not likely to remain true to itself when it attempts to become a mass movement...
...Toward the end of the book Lewy quotes Camus's warning that some forms of sincerity "are worse than lies...
...True enough, the first few chapters discuss pacifism itself, and the book is dotted with criticisms by longtime pacifists upset with the drift of their respective organizations...
...It couldn't be a more timely work...
...You owe it to six years—six years and one day on the sunny afternoon I met him...
...As Lewy points out, despite being relatively small in number the peace movement is perhaps more influential than ever, one example being the rejeLtion by America's Roman Catholic bishops of the idea of deterrence and, more recently, of the President's Star Wars program...
...Just ask the folks at Sham Shui Po...
...Time and again Peace and Revolution illustrates how old-timers in the movement—genuinely committed to this difficult principle and seasoned by bitter experience with Communist groups during World War II and the fifties—were most prescient about where their movement was heading and why it was going there...
...Topic index in each issue Refund offer You'll receive 52 issues for only $36.00 and you can obtain a full refund on unmailed copies at any time...
...Although Lewy takes time out to deal with the peace movement's flings with such countries as Nicaragua and Cuba, the book's 283 pages amply demonstrate that the real catalyst for its sorry transformation was Vietnam...
...For whereas most people will under certain conditions sanction war as a means to an end, a sometimes necessary evil if you will, pacifists make nonviolence an end in itself...
...We've seen it all before, says Lewy, who charts the hijacking of the peace movementthrough four mainline pacifist groups: the American Friends Service Committee, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom...
...Moreover, if we try to understand what is in their best interests, we are likely often to support such revolutions in the Third World...
...As Weigel further notes and Lewy more than proves, pacifism never did pick up this thread, to the great loss of both American society and the movement itself...
...I understand I can obtain a full refund on on mailed copies at any time...
...Like religious communities, pacifism can opt for purity, a way of example without retreating into naivete...
...And in the Philippines right now, it is the peace movement's financial and moral support that helps keep the insurgency alive and, even within the Aquino government, fuels the resentment against the US...
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...Lewy points out that in the aftermath of World War I, pacifism became inextricably linked with socialism, particularly because of the argument that "wars are based on the economic rivalries of imperialist nations and are encouraged by the traffic in armaments carried on by profit-hungry capitalists...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick James Kilpatrick Donald Lambro Joseph Sobran R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...So whereas old-timers were people who were pacifists first and fuzzy socialists second, the new breed were committed socialists who didn't seem to comprehend the radicalism of the genuine pacifist position...
...More important, the book should be required reading for U.S...
Vol. 21 • October 1988 • No. 10
