The New Pacifism

...Deceived by the rhetoric of liberal democracy, pacifists sometimes speak as if American society were based entirely on the consent of its members, and blithely assume that the principle of consent can be extended into the arena of international politics...

...The pacifist asserts the universal applicability of non-violent methods as a substitute for war and revolution, and triumphantly cites such "evidence" as the Indian Liberation movement and the Southern sit-ins...

...If pacifism is to become a significant radical force in the sixties, it would be well to give its credentials careful scrutiny...

...The New Pacifism has been called into being by advances in military technology...

...tion between tactics and ultimate objectives, between ends and means...

...The pacifist stance is that of the Protestant evangelist...

...Particularly for students, the philosophy of non-violence put into practice in the South exercises a seductive appeal...

...It is perhaps fortunate that few pacifists feel compelled to draw the obvious inference that capitalism, socialism, Christianity, democracy, and marriage have also "failed...

...Pragmatic choice of non-violent tactics in appropriate circumstances is one thing...

...This is an age in which much blood has been shed in pursuit of utopia, and pacifists deserve credit for their perception that violence tends to be self-perpetuating...

...1. At the very center of pacifism is a core of faith which resists rational analysis and evaluation...

...Pacifists here were generally quick to see the Fascist menace, and some urged aggressive "preventive measures" of a nonmilitary character which might have severely hampered the dictators in the early years...

...The longing for a total vision of life which popularized crisis theology on the campus in the fifties may find expression in pacifism in the sixties...

...It is quite possible that the circumstances of our age will make non-violence increasingly suitable as a technique of mass action...

...Of how much real weight as evidence for the pacifist proposition are such instances...

...Pacifism appears a bright shining cause...

...In a world of tanks and jet fighters, Ghandian methods of mass resistance may be the only effective means of opposing a regime in many cases...

...Whatever the problem—a strike for union recognition, an international crisis over the economic privileges of an imperial power, a civil war—the pacifist appeals to the "spark of the divine" which is in every individual...

...But can it be doubted that the position of the Negro in, say, Mississippi would be much more dangerous if the possibility of Northern interference were removed...

...4. A third pacifist tenet is the doctrine that, in pacifist lingo, "ends and means are convertible...

...The other alternative, the pallid defensive liberalism of the fifties, is equally uninspiring...

...An affirmative answer raises the question: has not the threat of violence been the ultimate sanction which has made federal power effective...

...They embrace, to varying degrees, political pressure and legal coercion as techniques of struggle, but unreservedly condemn the use of physical force...

...An awareness of power relations is the prime ingredient necessary to construct what pacifism lacks—a social philosophy which locates discontented social groups which constitute a social base for a political movement...

...Thus an exposition of "the pacifist ethic and humanism" by a leader of the Student Peace Union declares that "such eminent psychologists as Karl Menninger, Erich Fromm and Sigmund Freud [I] have pointed out that love is a more powerful force than hate...

...Society is a structure of power, and the distribution of social power is determined by the clash of competing interest groups or classes...

...Forced away from their lofty internationalism by the pressure of events, many American pacifists then plunged into ugly isolationism...

...In each case, the conditions of the struggle and the nature of the antagonist were peculiarly well-suited to non-violent action...

...In recent months the cause of non-violence has reaped further gains from its dramatic application in the Southern sit-ins...

...The pacifist mentality is slow to recognize that societies are more than mere collections of souls, and that social decisions are shaped by forces other than individual will...

...But it is false to insist that lesser-evil calculations must never be made in politics...

...More limited military conflicts will be unfortunate but these are almost certain to recur again and again...

...But the pacifist, I believe, displays a curious eagerness to leap into darkness at the earliest opportunity rather than as a last resort...

...Hume has shown us the inescapable gap between fact and value, and we all recognize that ultimate value judgments involve some leap of faith...

...Pacifism of this variety is an especially naive version of Lockean liberalism which nervously lifts its skirts at the mention of social power...

...The gulf that divides their views of "human nature" is ordinarily so profound as to be unbridgable...

...Foreign policy moved to the center of the American political stage, and pacifists felt increasingly compelled to take politically relevant action against "that warmonger" in the White House...

...3. An important segment of the pacifist movement—represented by A. J. Muste and some younger radical leaders like James Lawson—can be partially exempted from this charge...

...As Niebuhr observes, "those who benefit from social injustice are less capable of understanding its real character than those who suffer from it...

...Michael Walzer's recent essay on "The Politics of the New Negro," [DISSENT, Summer 1960] for instance, reveals that not all Americans, not all Negroes, but certain Negroes in a specific social situation have acted as the driving force in the Negro student movement...

...My purpose here is to insist on this distinction, and to argue that pacifism as a total vision of life is highly unsatisfactory...

...The frontier nickname for the Colt 45., "Old Equalizer," sums up the age of small arms warfare now dead...

...The simple-mindedness of this line of reasoning is staggering...

...Unable to comprehend society, pacifism of this variety is useless as a tool for political analysis...

...The object of action is to win souls, and all souls are equally candidates for salvation...

...The battles of the thirties are dead, and the traces of radicalism that have survived the thirties seem quaint and cold...

...But as the world moved closer and closer to war, pacifist fear of American involvement began to blot out the movement's moralistic internationalism...

...Principled political action is in fact impossible without a clear grasp of the distinc...

...The first of these is the assumption that the principle of consent is sufficient to explain the functioning of a complex social order...

...From this premise it follows that one can never successfully use "bad" means for "good" ends, for bad means can have only evil consequences...

...This bias towards atomistic individualism, this blindness to power is a radical defect...

...The history of the American pacifist movement in the thirties provides abundant documentation of this point...

...2. Three crucial premises of pacifist argument demand closer inspection...

...Society is viewed as one vast Quaker meeting, a collection of sweetly reasonable atoms in which decisions emerge not out of conflict but out of "harmonious interaction...

...Bayonets alone will win no permanent victory for human rights, but in a desperate crisis sometimes only bayonets can protect them...

...Social change takes place when one of the competing parties is able to grasp further power and wield it successfully...

...But large-scale military conflict with conventional weapons is improbable and dangerous, not unthinkable...

...The development of military technology has already proceeded to the point where the state frequently possesses such a monopoly of the means of violence as to make it impregnable to military assault from internal revolutionary forces...

...He is right to maintain that nuclear war is unthinkable...

...Where law comes clothed in the language of high moral purpose, it requires some hard-headedness to see that behind every law, however unanimous the consent of its subjects, stands the policeman's night stick...

...Shattered by the international crisis of the late thirties, pacifism had become by 1941 an intellectually bankrupt, morally compromised appendage to America First...

...A longing for absolute solutions is integral to the pacifist ethos...

...This is not, of course, to reduce the delicate legal and moral fabric of a democratic society to organized terror...

...Conceding that power pervades society, pacifists of this persuasion fall back on the assumption that there is a qualitative difference between violence and other forms of social power...

...Both of these dogmas rest on assumptions about the quantum of good and evil in the universe which many non-pacifists will find difficult to accept...

...Let the pacifist struggling to win freedom for the Southern Negro ask himself whether or not the exercise of federal power on behalf of the Negro in recent years has materially aided his cause...

...There will again be times of painful choice, times when the radical must choose not peace but freedom and equality...

...A probing discussion of the roots of pacifism inevitably drives the pacifist into a leap of faith his questioner is unable to take...

...The history of each is too complicated to enter into here, but one point is clear to the non-pacifist...

...The very essence of law, indeed, is the exercise of social power (ultimately physical violence) in order to restrain recalcitrant individuals or groups...

...It is equally true, if less obvious, when he opposes a pacifist whose point of departure is humanist...

...There may be debate over the expediency of dispatching federal troops to Little Rock at a given time...

...The same writer advances as a central tenet the principle that "it is more important that we do good ourselves than that we suppress evil in others...

...Our age of nuclear terror has given new force to the pacifist dogma that war is the supreme evil, to be avoided at all costs...

...The choice of violence is evil, but often a lesser evil...

...It seems plausible to distinguish sharply between violence and other forms of power in a society which enjoys democratic political institutions...

...Peace is a value, but not the highest value...

...espousal of the pacifist world-view quite another...

...The pacifist true believer scorns such tests...

...The impossibilisme which denies this is perilous, for when it is shattered by the imperative need to act, all restraint is gone...

...But the only test of this hypothesis is the pragmatic test...

...Consider the recurrent pacifist complaint that every war has "failed," and that hence we must abandon war as a method of solving disputes...

...S. A word on pacifist "successes...

...This is most evident when a secular non-pacifist confronts a religious pacifist...

...For him, peace is the overarching, all-embracing good (the Peace that surpasseth understanding...