The New Peace Movement - Part I
Finch, Roy
Mass warfare developed in the modern world even before mass production or mass literacy. One of the rights won by the French revolution, as it turned out, was the right of everyone to take part...
...The second related development is a growing awareness that moral and intellectual arguments are insufficient in the absence of a concrete program...
...But this moral capital is not inexhaustible...
...Was not non-violence just as potentially coercive as violence...
...we shoot capitalists—do you see the distinction...
...The radical's chief delusion has been the cabbalistic notion that he can "use" evil...
...He accepts this "filthy necessity," (the delusory "ne cessity" hiding the genuine moral "filth"), if not with a clear consci ence, at least with a secret sense of superiority, which in itself should have made his course suspect...
...The relativity of human choice, which is always with us, should not hide the difference between supporting human values in the present and being prepared to sacrifice them wholesale for imagined future goods...
...That ceases to awe us...
...They all reflect the belief that some social grouping is prior to the human (a priority which unfortunately is embodied in the very word social-ism...
...Techniques of advertising, mass communication and huge public rallies were used by World Peaceways, organized in 1931, which collected over a million signatures for peace...
...For almost fifty years this group, led by Alfred Love, rallied support for immediate universal disarmament, boycott of war taxes and a constitutional amendment depriving the federal government of war-making powers...
...A National Peace Congress in New York in 1907 was attended by most of the members of the Supreme Court, the two presidential candidates, innumerable Congressmen, mayors and governors...
...Each war, he said, comes as a special temptation to some...
...8 Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist...
...History involves the complex interaction of all three factors—the ancient triumvirate of necessity, human choice and chance (or fate, freedom and fortune, the last replaced by Providence in the religious view...
...Later it led to the setting up of the relief agency CARE, and the present Peace Corps is clearly much influenced by this background of "service" philosophy...
...Various proposals for a non-violent army tend to run afoul of this strong anti-authoritarianism...
...it had to be adhered to even under the most extreme provocation...
...The battle of the social engineers of various stripes (socialist, communist, capitalist) to tame the most intractable of animals—the human being—and compress him into suitable social moulds is succeeding all too well today, but for reasons which escape the intelligentsia, who are usually on the side of the engineers and not of the human beings...
...Do you grasp this—distinction...
...Even Gandhi said: "It goes against my nature to plan...
...In this sense my very non-resistance becomes the highest kind of resistance to evil" (italics in original...
...In 1940 and 1941 the popular peace movement again evaporated into thin air...
...As a cause, it had its share of heroic personalities, men beaten and starved, kept in solitary confinement for long periods of time, even tortured to death...
...The full concreteness of history lies in the interweaving of these three aspects, and leaving any one of them out distorts our understanding...
...5 But after each war a virtually new start had to be made, drawing on a new fund of post-war disillusionment...
...Often it seemed that the two groups did not speak the same language, but more often the first group sparked and gave leadership to the second...
...I claim the right to offer the utmost moral resistance . . . to every manifestation of evil among mankind," he wrote...
...The failure of the easy optimism of the period before World War I drove home to many the lesson that the abolition of war implies far-reaching social changes...
...Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1952, pp...
...Large-scale mass non-violent action requires organization, training and discipline, which are not congenial to the pacifist...
...The gap between the tiny number of war-time pacifists and the relatively large number of peace-time pacifists could not be bridged...
...We have seen too many supermen now, and we do not trust them, especially when they have guns in their hands...
...He then goes on to explain that he advocates "non-injurious resistance...
...He stands in front of me, supported by several men...
...It may be argued that this leaves all the odds on Frick's side...
...The insistence on the word "civilian" was, of course, to guard against it being used for military projects...
...It is a melancholy tale-125 years of attempts to build peace on the shifting sands of popular emotion...
...The answer was "service," which meant primarily food distribution and relief work, and later work camps for rebuilding devastated or poverty-striken areas...
...Such action was an attempt to use moral force as a weapon...
...Nay, I hold it my duty to offer such moral resistance...
...Frick's insensitivity to the suffering of the Homestead strikers and their families is matched by Berkman's insensitivity to the man in front of him...
...In prison other pacifists engaged in work stoppages and hunger strikes...
...Arguments based on the horrors of war, the cost of war, the ineffectuality of war did not strike deep enough...
...His face is ashen grey...
...The argument is most often about what moulds and who is going to do the compressing, rather than how to escape this eventuality altogether...
...and those whom one war leaves untouched another may sweep away...
...It is estimated that in 1933 there were some 12 million adherents of peace groups...
...History does not make us either more or less than human...
...His moment of shame is his superiority, not his quick suppression of it...
...The gendarmerie of Tsarism throttled the workers who were fighting for the Socialist order...
...It is difficult to imagine what else can prevent further repetitions of the atrocities which go with twentieth-century ideological and nationalistic madness...
...Non-violent resistance came to have a militant meaning, arising out of the conflict with the government and the "buffers" of the historic peace churches...
...But Berkman should be able to do what Frick cannot do, and that is to conceive of his opponent as a human being...
...the black beard streaked with red, and blood is oozing from his neck...
...The truth is that the social has no priority over the human...
...A social or economic role does not qualify a person for being shot...
...It is idle to talk about "humanistic radicalism" as long as we use the words "revolutionary necessity" to justify crimes—crimes which then go on and on...
...7 Leon Trotsky, The Defence of Terrorism (Terrorism and Communism...
...He mistakes the Prince of Darkness for a scullery maid...
...The fact that the non-violent aspect was often more a matter of necessity than of principle was regarded as an unfortunate weakness...
...Service and Resistance The chief expression of the "service" point of view, however, was the "alternative service" program for conscientious objectors in World War II...
...Preserving spontaneity and informality, and still keeping the discipline of non-violence presents difficulties which pacifists are far from having solved...
...Non-resistance is presented as a personal affair, a way of reacting to a personal injury...
...We see only murderer and murdered reflecting each other and changing into each ,other again and again...
...This was true of religious bodies, labor, students— none proved particularly reliable...
...The peace movement succeeded superficially, but it was unable to strike deep roots—philosophically, politically or socially...
...Once more the peace movement burgeoned, the Fellowship of Reconciliation concentrating on religious groups, the War Resisters League on socialists and independent leftists...
...The pre-war Woman's Peace Party gave way to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a still larger group, the National Council for the Prevention of War was formed in 1921...
...Opposing authority, often at considerable risk, he submits unwillingly to another authority...
...It implied a degree of self-control which, even Gandhi admitted, could only be expected from a few...
...Such militant non-violent action, however, gave rise to new problems...
...it isn't so easy to be "super-human...
...It is only in moral terms that it can be condemned...
...The historic peace churches set up and administered, under Selective Service supervision, a program of forest service and mental hospital work for war-time pacifists known as Civilian Public Service...
...An absolute enemy, then, in the absence of any principle of common humanity, is fit only for extermination...
...What was essential, in Gandhi's view, was that the leadership be committed to the principle...
...Non-violent action could be understood as the most advanced way of carrying on social conflict...
...The number of Quakers who served in the armed forces in both World Wars far outweighed those who refused to serve, and leading Quakers argued for the support of both wars...
...To find a new basis for political life and for carrying on social struggles is essential for a new radicalism...
...Not only the American Peace Society, but the Carnegie Endowment, the World Peace Foundation, the Church Peace Union and the other newly triumphant peace groups swung into line behind another "exceptional" war—this time the war to put an end to war...
...A Committee for Non-Violent Revolution was organized in 1946 by men meeting in Chicago in defiance of Selective Service orders...
...Even as the world was preparing for World War II, the sentiment for peace again seemed almost universal...
...In this situation the pacifist, when insisting that human beings must be dealt with in human terms, that the human being is more important than any theory and that the inhuman methods cannot achieve human goals, is pointing in the right direction...
...Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950...
...Nineteenth century radicalism had at its center a core of terrorism...
...Drafted objectors were assigned to this "service," and the program was justified on the grounds that it was constructive and displayed "positive" cooperation with the government...
...We seem to know no answer but more and more social rationalization...
...Scientifically, technically, there is nothing to be said against Buchenwald...
...Service," however, lost much of its import when it was conscripted...
...The absolute moral commitment of the war-time pacifist tended again to make sense as each war receded into the past...
...Strikes and slow-downs were carried out in government camps...
...Either it became a wholly individual affair—a few persons converted to life-long, unyielding pacifism—or it became a diffuse expression of popular sentiment, easy to join and agree with, but equally easy to leave when another war approached...
...The Civil War looked "different...
...It is said that when Love asked Andrew Carnegie for funds for the Universal Peace Union he received instead a signed photograph...
...the pacifist replies: "No, we do not see the distinction...
...Alfred Love himself seemed to be in a dozen places at once, editing the Union's paper The Peacemaker, lobbying in Washington, even intervening in labor disputes, and traveling up and down the country speaking and organizing...
...To Trotsky's question: "The previous regime shot workers...
...4 Mulford Q. Sibley and Philip E. Jacob, Conscription of Conscience—The American State and the Conscientious Objector-1940-1947...
...Furthermore, we do not see history mysteriously turning murder into a good...
...The acceptance of this terrorism by Communists is vividly expressed in Trotsky's book of 1920, Terrorism and Communism...
...Marxism is not exempt from morality...
...New York: Mother Earth Publishing Co., 1912, p. 8. 9 Ibid., p. 35...
...Almost simultaneously similar groups sprang up in England and on the European continent...
...Gandhi had stressed openness and honesty...
...The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with ten million dollars and the World Peace Foundation with one million dollars seemed to make the smaller groups unnecessary...
...He believes that he has been admitted into the arcanum of history, siding with the powers of good, and that now he knows that evil too can be of "use...
...This then involved them potentially in another kind of resistance—resistance to the state, which might take the form of civil disobedience...
...A social grouping of class, race or nation is given priority to the "merely human...
...In this area fatalism runs rampant...
...The Napoleonic wars inaugurated the period of conscripted armies in which the whole citizenry is drawn into fighting...
...Some men refused to enter these camps...
...Philadelphia: J. Miller McKim, 1846, p. 11...
...In the attempt to answer these questions pacifists turned to Gandhi...
...it aimed at confronting opponents with the overt implications of their compliance with a social evil...
...Only a remnant of the Universal Peace Union and a handful of the innumerable intellectuals, educators, artists and ministers who had unreservedly supported the peace cause continued to oppose the war...
...On the surface this may appear to be so, but a closer look reveals a development in at least two respects...
...The shift from non-resistance to non-violent resistance brought pacifism into relation with traditional radical groups...
...It is typical of this way of thinking that it efficiently describes this sacrifice of the human as "the human cost," as if human beings were what is expendable and the institutional framework and future goals were what really matter...
...The non-violent action point of view led also to the conclusion that revolutions failed because of their violence, which restored old power methods and built up a new fund of resentment and hatred...
...He has just shot and then stabbed Frick: An officer pulls my head back by the hair, and my eyes meet Frick's...
...As indeed the Marxist understands, the proletariat have accumulated a moral capital which provides, so to speak, a temporary moral immunity for those who act for it, or even claim to act for it...
...Thousands, for example, who had opposed the Crimean War, did not oppose Garibaldi's war in Italy...
...While this movement drew much of its inspiration from religious sources, it had also a secular character stemming from eighteenth century humanitarianism, which distinguished it from previous Quaker and Anabaptist opposition to war...
...The majority might accept it only out of necessity...
...History, in the almost mathematical exactness of its retribution, permits only so much abuse of force...
...But he deceives himself...
...Peace leaders could find no group dedicated to peace...
...Frick has to be transformed from a suffering human being into a class enemy...
...Trotsky wrote: The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat...
...Much space was devoted to debating the question of the difference between defensive and offensive wars...
...5 Norman Thomas, The Conscientious Objector in America...
...Pacifists could now maintain that radicals had never been radical enough about their means, but only about their ends...
...With the best of intentions "service" pacifists had, it came to seem, provided a rationale for a kind of concentration camp program, however humane and "cushioned" it might be...
...But it remained an individual matter, a single action by a single individual...
...On the contrary, it seems to him that "being human" is not something to be postponed...
...The use of executions, fear, terror and lies as conscious policy under the pretext of "necessity" perpetuates the delusion that social progress can be made without any corresponding progress in the human and the humane...
...Gandhi had laid down the conditions for non-violent action: that it must be undertaken only as a last resort, that it must be carried through without hate, that it must be aimed at policies and not persons...
...Could they forge papers, take assumed names, steal documents, cooperate with other underground groups engaged in killing...
...6 " What constitutes non-injurious resistance...
...Statements which a William Ladd, an Elihu Burritt, or an Alfred Love would have made in the past were now made as a matter of course by generals and cabinet officers—even as they prepared for more war...
...As war became more devastating, mass propaganda became more effective...
...One of the rights won by the French revolution, as it turned out, was the right of everyone to take part in war...
...Hatred is the antidote for shame...
...This is due, in large part, to two things: the impact of the ideas of Gandhi and the development of the atomic bomb...
...We might as well speak of the "merely social"1) Nothing is more concrete than suffering, and suffering is not limited to any social group...
...Out of this new debacle there emerged two new peace organizations —the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters International, both formed during the war by pacifist remnants...
...Many pacifists, like William Lloyd Garrison, were also abolitionists and explained that in this case it was necessary to support war in order to get rid of a still greater evil—slavery...
...it looked like an "exception," one war at least which could be justified...
...3 Merle E. Curti, Peace or War—The American Struggle-1636-1936...
...New York: John Day, 1930...
...An internecine struggle took place between "service" pacifists (who were accused of "fronting" for the government) and "resistance" pacifists (who were accused of not having a "genuinely pacifist spirit...
...But necessity has a limited role, and there is no possibility of merely living in terms of that even if we wanted to...
...And a third factor is also present—the factor of chance, the extraneous element which intervenes...
...The direct action pacifist, in his apoliticalism and extremism, has surprisingly much in common with the terrorist, but he refuses to be either more or less than human...
...A New Transformation Since World War II the peace movement has undergone another transformation, this time more thoroughgoing than any in the past...
...socialist and labor antiwar groups vied with each other in their patriotism...
...By copying the very methods of those they sought to overthrow, revolutions guaranteed their own failure...
...Ballou and other pacifists argued that those who believed in this kind of non-resistance could not participate in war...
...The peace that everyone wants, in effect no one wants...
...The seeming negativism of this point of view and its lack of social content gave rise during World War I to the "service" philosophy of pacifism...
...Continued in our next issue) i See John Neff, War and Human Progress...
...Such "dehumanizing" of the enemy is the quintessence of twentieth century ideology...
...To understand the significance of Gandhi for American pacifists it is necessary to look at the conflict between two fundamental ideas and orientations in the peace movement: the idea of non-resistance and the idea of non-violent resistance...
...While about 4,000 objectors maintained their views after being drafted in World War I and there were at least 50,000 objectors conscripted or imprisoned in World War II, the total number of men drafted altogether rose from 2,800,000 in World War I to 13,000,000 in World War II 4 Even the historic peace churches had difficulty in maintaining their pacifism...
...The revolutionist, he wrote, is: A being who has neither personal interests nor desires above the necessities of the Cause, one who has emancipated himself from being merely human and has risen above that, even to the height of conviction which excludes all doubt, all regret...
...Burritt was a man of great energy who had taught himself thirty languages while working as a blacksmith...
...The almost complete collapse of the peace cause in the face of the Civil War is a striking example of what would happen again and again...
...It does not relieve us of that much responsibility...
...Trotsky could hardly have anticipated that this same weapon of terrorism would be used against him and other Communists...
...To be successful non-violence had to be a matter of principle and not merely of technique...
...They discussed such questions as the use of strikes and slow-downs, the morality of sabotage and techniques of mass demonstration and direct action...
...It was small consolation that this time the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League survived...
...It could be understood to include the actions of labor and minority groups when they went outside of established channels by engaging in strikes, sit-downs, demonstrations and the like...
...Nonresistance, he said, is another kind of resistance...
...On the eve of the Civil War Burritt pointed out the implications of what was happening...
...And there is no blank check for doing the shooting...
...At the outset Ballou made it plain that he rejected passivity...
...This universalization of war was a break with the tradition of limited wars which had prevailed, for the most part, from the middle ages through the eighteenth century...
...Behind Berkman's contemptuous dismissal of the "merely human" lurk the coming shadows of Hitler, Stalin, and Eichmann...
...London: Labor Publishing Co., 1921, p. 56...
...For us Communists it is quite sufficient...
...What the nineteenth century called "abstract humanism" is replaced by unlimited social conflict justifying unlimited inhumanity...
...The Universal Peace Union, in this respect, was in advance of the American Peace Society, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation and War Resisters League have taken further steps in the same direction...
...Violence, for the pacifist, is intrinsically reactionary, no matter who uses it or for what end...
...Under what circumstances, if at all, were secrecy and deception permissible...
...Could pacifists engage in the destruction of property, the blowing of bridges and so forth, if there were no injury to human life involved...
...The Universal Peace Union did not knuckle under to the Spanish American War (though this was widely accepted as a "noble" war to free Cuba from Spanish tyranny), but it went down before the seemingly universal triumph of the peace cause in the years 1900-14...
...The average citizen would now learn to identify himself with the state, first of all by being expected to fight and die for it.' The modern American peace movement had its origins in a reaction to this new development, and particularly to the Napoleonic wars...
...Was nothing learned from these experiences...
...The first is a growing awareness of the social and economic causes of war...
...Violence for us is not the measure of 'realism,' but of another kind of unrealism...
...Under the influence of early modern science with its excessive causalism and determinism, social theory, including Marxism, tended to discount human choice and also the factor of chance (the latter perhaps present in human life as "spontaneity...
...They reveal non-resistance as a "positive" or "therapeutic" response by one individual to a wrong done him by another individual...
...It is based on a disguised moral passion, and without this moral passion it would vanish...
...New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1923...
...New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1936, pp...
...It aims at the conscience and understanding of the individual wrong-doer...
...Relation With Radicalism The wartime resistance movements, particularly in Norway and Denmark where pacifists participated in the underground, raised the most serious problems...
...About half of Ballou's book is devoted to anecdotes illustrating it...
...but the next moment I am filled with anger at the sentiment, so unworthy of a revolutionist...
...He does not regard "being human" as the easiest thing in the world, so that all our efforts must be bent on trying not to be human...
...in short, one who in the very inmost of his soul feels himself revolutionist first, human afterwards .8 Despite his contempt for it, the "merely human" keeps breaking through...
...In a little book published in 1846 called Christian Non-Resistance G/ one of the early peace leaders, Adin Ballou, laid down the classic position...
...The first American peace societies were founded in New York, Massachusetts and Ohio in 1815...
...The terrorist aspires to be more-than-human, while his enemy, in his eyes, sinks to the less-than-human...
...This became the watershed between pacifists and general peace sympathizers, the pacifists maintaining that the distinction had lost its meaning and that every war would now appear "defensive" to both sides...
...The peace movement, he argued, could never succeed as long as pacifists made exceptions for particular "noble" wars...
...In this respect, at least, humanity is a real enough fact...
...With defiant hatred I look him full in the face .9 Here is the text for the anarchist—and the pacifist...
...6 Adin Ballou, Christian Non-Resistance—Illustrated and defined...
...Although the two concepts are often lumped together in the public mind and the one has grown out of the other, there is a radical difference between them...
...He refuses to dehumanize either himself or his enemy...
...others walked out of them...
...The shift from one to the other represents a change from a conservative, individually-oriented pacifism to a radical, social action pacifism...
...The arguments of the peace movement were more and more accepted—but only up to a point...
...Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1929, pp...
...202 ff...
...What could the pacifist do in place of fighting...
...It is a pacifist dogma that "the more violence the less revolution...
...He had a flair for the dramatic and not only urged a universal strike against war, but succeeded in collecting 20,000 pledges not to fight, an effort paralleled later by the British Peace Pledge Union in the 1930s, which collected 100,000 such pledges, almost all, like Burritt's, quickly forgotten when war broke out...
...Each summer at Mystic, Conn., rallies of sometimes thousands of people were held, at which singing, banners and speeches dramatized the cause...
...2 Merle E. Curti, The American Peace Crusade-1815-1860...
...he has the justification of power and the status quo, and nothing is going to dislodge him...
...2 In reaction to the compromises of the American Peace Society, a new peace movement came into being after the Civil War, centering around the Universal Peace Union, which was founded in 1866...
...Only a few, like Burritt and the anarchist Josiah Warren, held out...
...Berkman describes the true revolutionist as one who is willing "to sacrifice all merely human feeling at the call of the People's Cause...
...The principal arguments against war—still used today—were developed by the American Peace Society, especially in its magazine Advocate of Peace, which continued to come out monthly or bimonthly with only a few lapses for almost a hundred years, though it later lost its specifically pacifist character...
...Having felt the "bond of suffering" which reduces everything to the "merely human," Berkman can only counteract it by invoking his hatred...
...Even the increase in the number of conscientious objectors, which pacifists sometimes find encouraging, has not been, on the whole, impressive...
...It is a dream of total control, ostensibly aimed at liberating the rebellious human being, but actually moving toward squashing every bit of rebelliousness out of him...
...If it was not voluntary, what after all distinguished it from involuntary servitude...
...About this—that choice is always with us—we have no choice...
...A peace movement based on these arguments was convincing only until another "exceptional" war came along...
...Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist order...
...The leaders of the American Peace Society argued that the Civil War was not really a war at all, but only a "rebellion," and any government was justified in putting down a rebellion...
...The American Friends Service Committee, founded by the Quakers in 1917, arose out of this concept...
...How, after all, did non-violent resistance differ from violent resistance...
...The Carnegie Endowment turned its offices over to the Creel Committee, the government propaganda agency...
...Berkman describes his attempted assassination of Henry Frick, the steel magnate, after the Homestead massacre...
...Peace, it seemed, had finally won the day.3 Again the collapse in 1917...
...We are not impressed by the ability or the need to disregard human feelings...
...205 ff...
...12 & 464...
...In retrospect no war looked as "necessary" as it had at the time...
...Besides every kind of necessity, there is, inescapably, human decision...
...The movement tended to lose itself in two extremes...
...For an instant a strange feeling, as of shame, comes over me...
...and still others insisted upon the establishment of openly government-run internment centers...
...To understand the objective nature of morality, however, will require a vast upheaval of thought, which has scarcely begun...
...The slow recognition that the moral factor cannot be expunged is being bought now at terrible cost...
...What is the Khrushchev charge against Stalin, if not that he made wrong choices...
...Ernest L. Meyer, "Hey Yellowbacks...
...By 1828 when the American Peace Society was formed, chiefly by William Ladd, there were dozens of small local peace groups, many of which gradually affiliated with it...
...We cannot understand what happens or why things almost never turn out the way we expect or plan for, unless we take all three into account...
...Could it not be used for just as destructive purposes...
...The Anarchist acceptance of terrorism is equally vividly shown in Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of An Anarchist...
...Resistance" pacifists felt themselves closer to the labor movement and the European underground than they did to traditional non-resistance...
...The "Temptations" of War The man who made peace an international cause was Elihu Burritt, the "learned blacksmith," who organized international peace congresses in the 1840s...
...A more realistic view of human history cannot discount the role of human choice and hence of the moral factor...
Vol. 10 • January 1963 • No. 1
