Necessary nonviolence
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey NECESSARY NONVIOLENCE IT HAS PROBLEMS, BUT WHAT DOESN'T? IN A RECENT editorial Commonweal's editors praised the many bishops who have spoken about the need to end...
...What we need is a defense of the idea of necessary evil: some things may be both necessary, and truly evil...
...Some early church canons seem to have had something like this idea in mind...
...there are problems with everything...
...He said that it would be better for people to stand up violently than not to stand up at all, and then came down on the side of nonviolence...
...She said she couldn't understand why a Catholic would ever bother with it...
...IN A RECENT editorial Commonweal's editors praised the many bishops who have spoken about the need to end the arms race, but dissociated Commonweal from the pacifist position...
...Violence between nations helps to preserve the belief that we are made safe by an identification with the state, which is seen as our security...
...My right to dissent matters more than the existence of the state, and I should not be grateful when the state refrains from suppressing dissent, any more than I should be grateful to my neighbor for not abusing my children...
...JOHN GARVEY...
...The mythology which sustains war is so strong that it bothers people less to contemplate the slaughter of a generation than the killing of the leader who sent that generation but to die...
...The state insists that we divide the world into an us and a them...
...Her husband was doing what he was doing only because his religion demanded it, and they found it a damned nuisance...
...The reason nonviolence is not seriously urged on us by any of the various institutions responsible for educating us is, I suspect, that the refusal involved in nonviolence is too profoundly threatening to too many cherished institutions, most of all the state...
...To protest the suppression of freedom in Poland is correct - but we must be equally outraged over the suppression of freedom in South Africa, Argentina, and El Salvador...
...The people who make war are the safest people in the world, and they should not be...
...But the state is always selectively indignant, because it must make alliances, and the enemy's enemy is always a friend, however evil...
...The history of war is a history of miscalculations made by leaders who were very sure of themselves, just as ours are...
...The reality of nuclear war will be Hiroshima and Nagasaki multiplied next time by many more cities, many millions of burned children, tens of millions of slow deaths...
...One of the best things about the anti-arms race statements of the bishops is that they are not at all legalistic...
...We can't allow any government to include us in its "us...
...But two things must be said here...
...And of course a limited nuclear war would not stop at what happened to Dresden or Hiroshima...
...A soldier must surrender moral judgment to his superiors...
...When I told her that I was a conscientious objector she was baffled...
...They are clearly pastoral, and come from prayer and personal experience, from visiting anti-war people in jail, and from considering the presence of large war-related industries in the towns the bishops have been called to serve...
...There are problems with pacifism, or nonviolence, or whatever you want to call it...
...Would violent resistance to Nazism by the Danes have saved more Jews than the remarkably effective nonviolent resistance which, in fact, saved nearly all of Denmark's Jews from extermination...
...There are problems, of course, with nonviolence...
...just kidding...
...For her the refusal to be part of an army was not at all a reflection of the spirit of the Gospel, but a bit of irritating obedience to churchly legislation...
...Nonviolent resistance has its victories, however, and the history of warlike solutions is hardly a history of stunning successes...
...torture is a common tactic for many of our allies...
...almost any "them" will suffer by comparison...
...both Reagan and Brezhnev would claim to be in favor of peace...
...It is wonderful to see that a number of our bishops are responding to their own discoveries in a way which is of such benefit to all of us...
...One is that we should not thank the state for our freedom...
...Wars today cannot be limited to the battlefield, and in any serious confrontation the temptation to use nuclear weapons will be great...
...And perhaps such involvements may prove to be compelling...
...I am sure that this is not the way it is for all of the Amish, but the encounter helped me to see that legalism does kill the spirit, and that the truths you try to live by must be discovered personally, and cannot be imposed...
...the one who dies would not exist if he had not been loved from before the beginning of time...
...This spirit is a long way from the one found in Cardinal Cooke's message to the chaplains, which finds the state's preparation for the destruction of whole civilian populations acceptable, so long as it is agreed that the government will never really do it...
...If Hitler violated the image of God in himself, it was nevertheless real...
...The purity which allows a Hitler to reign isn't pure at all...
...The assumption made by defenders of violence is that nonviolent resistance is impractical and doesn't work, which implies that violence does, or at least that it is ordinarily more effective...
...There is something craven and dishonest in the argument that the state protects my right to dissent, and therefore I should not dissent...
...no one has the power to cancel that reality, and any murder, even of an evil man, involves the killer in a mystery of evil...
...Many more people have died at the hands of a regime which our government supports in El Salvador than have died in Poland...
...The other thing which must be said is that while we are more free than most nations, within our borders, the government supports regimes which crush the freedom of other people...
...I don't like the word "pacifist...
...It ought to be clear that if Japan had had the atomic bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been followed by Seattle and Portland...
...Nonviolent resistance assumes that an individual has not only a right but sometimes even a duty to refuse obedience or allegiance to someone, or some institution, which claims authority over him...
...This is as true in El Salvador as it is in Poland...
...But this is a long way from the spirit of the sort of moral theology many of us grew up on, which found extenuating circumstances for nearly every warlike action and waved away the notion that a person ought to feel contaminated even by necessary violence...
...but here a soldier must hope that his refusal to obey will be vindicated by higher authorities, and he may not question the direction of the war itself...
...It implies, as it shouldn't, the willingness to let anything terrible happen without any opposition...
...To kill another is never a good thing...
...Anything is permitted now...
...Assassination makes more sense than war, after all...
...Would it be right, for example, to refrain from assassinating a Hitler...
...The word "nonviolence" isn't much better...
...Whatever is done to the least human being is done to Christ...
...We cannot yet imagine what the limits of a nuclear war might be...
...we should instead be watchful, to make sure that the state doesn't try to limit or remove those freedoms...
...it is one of the things bishops are for, and it is encouraging, in the richest sense of the word...
...Would the independence of India have been more firmly secured if violent rather than nonviolent means had been employed...
...His action was better than the interpretation of nonviolence which would leave a Hitler in power, facing no resistance...
...But maybe in a sense it was: when you can accept the massive destruction of civilian life as a legitimate tactic you have passed an important and terrible barrier...
...We are good, or at least represent good, while their side is evil, or at least a representative of evil...
...Gandhi's word was satyagraha, "truth force...
...The beginning of sanity is to be found in the rejection of their logic...
...We're only trying to scare you, Russia...
...Apart from the fact that my enemy must be as much Christ to me as my neighbor is, there is another problem with what war demands...
...Our governmental system tries in many of its laws to embody the traditions of freedom from authoritarian interference which go back to the Magna Carta and beyond, but we should not therefore be grateful to the state...
...True, mutually assured destruction or even the risk of a more limited nuclear war may frighten our leaders into sanity or at least restraint...
...it is better to involve oneself in the mystery of evil, in fear and trembling...
...This absence.of legalism is refreshing and important...
...But isn't our system better than theirs...
...Bonhoeffer found it necessary to involve himself in just such an attempt, and I cannot say that he was wrong to have done so...
...it goes right to the heart of the problem...
...We have to view this issue as the abolitionists viewed slavery: a limited nuclear defense is no more acceptable than a little slavery...
...I have known Catholic pacifists who say that service in the army should simply be declared a sin...
...That is true here as well...
...but the odds are against that...
...The word "peace" has been used so badly that to be pro-peace doesn't mean much...
...I don't believe that anyone can surrender conscience to that extent...
...But there are many more problems with the acceptance - even the tentative, heavily qualified acceptance - of violence as a means to the end of securing justice, and those problems become particularly acute for Christians...
...The one recognized exception is the case of the obvious war crime...
...In a recent Newsweek column George Will, chiding the Catholic bishops for their opposition to the arms race, compared what might happen in a limited nuclear war to what happened at Dresden and said that, awful as it was, the fire-bombing of Dresden wasn't really the end of everything...
...We do not yet have the courage to imagine what the result will be if the temptation becomes overwhelming...
...The arms race and the near-certainty of eventual nuclear war put the burden of proof on non-pacifists...
...I wish we had other words, less negative ones, for what nonviolence is...
...They said that a person who shed blood, even in self-defense, had to refrain from the Eucharist for a period of several years...
...And the perverse moralism which is an inevitable part of war allows us to assume that our side is virtuous while their side is evil...
...Though it would be a sin for me, that sort of statement, applied to anything - even where it is as objectively terrible as killing - seems wrong to me, and I realized why when I met a young Amish woman whose husband was doing alternative service during the war in Vietnam...
...Christians can't buy into this morality...
...All of us can imagine situations in which violence seems to be less evil than its alternative...
...In a recent New Yorker article Jane Kramer wrote of resistance to the Hungarian government, "Dissidents say, simply, that it is humiliating for a man or a woman to be grateful to the state for whatever liberty the state allows...
...However, even the violence which might rid the world of a Hitler or an Idi Amin involves evil...
...Americans are certainly more free than most people have been in history...
...Mention this and a lot of people laugh nervously, as if assassination were more shocking than war...
...No government's army can allow its orders to be seriously questioned...
Vol. 109 • February 1982 • No. 3
