Life is easier if you’re a pacifist.
No, really. Pacifism is a one-size-fits-all, absolute moral code. No warring, no-way, no-how. No cost-benefit equation, risk analysis, or elaborate moral criteria required. You can spend absolutely zero time hung up on the value of a given conflict and move on to other things.
I’ve never been a pacifist. Sure it’s appealing as a philosophy, but violence is – well – just one of many things that people do from where I sit, so the question to my mind is how does it fit within a moral framework. To the pacifist, it simply doesn’t.
When the first Gulf War was Bushed on us, I wasted no time signing up to assist potential young draftees with conscientious objecting, should it come to that. I stood on street corners in Lexington Kentucky protesting against the war to the jeers of many passersby, and I was appalled by the reports of so many supposed lefties who supported the effort.
That’s not to say I wasn’t sympathetic to the feelings that Saddam was a nasty, evil territorial aggressor that should be stopped – I was. The war just seemed like a bad solution on many levels.
Flash forward to Afghanistan. We knew who was behind the 9-11 attacks, and we knew where they were operating from. I couldn’t, in good conscience, not support a military strike against those locations to eliminate (or at least seriously retard) their ability to repeat the attack. And yes, you read that right – I used the word “conscience.” I did, however, feel profoundly uncomfortable with the expansion of that strike to include a mission of full-on regime change in Afghanistan-proper. Like many, I had asked myself whether or not the Taliban’s horrific actions against women merited military intervention. It seemed clear to me that it merited more international intervention of some sort than had been undertaken up to that point, but slipping it in as a freebie under what I saw as a more appropriate use of military force was not the way.
And then, of course, there was the Iraq War, god help us…
So here we’re faced with involvement in Libya. You’ve got a dictator who is legendarily brutal facing a truly homegrown resistance motivated by a desire for basic rights and freedom. The very motivations that have brought about so much of what is good in the human world. This resistance has started getting pummeled by the dictator who is using his considerable wealth to bring in outside mercenaries with whom he has cultivated long-term relationships with. ANd the resistance has spoken with unusual clarity to outsiders, specifically the US; please give us air support, but no ground troops.
Again, this is not an issue for pacifists – and I don’t say that to exclude them from the discussion, just to make the point that it’s a fundamentally different discussion to them. But for the rest of us anti-war lefties who can conceive of the concept of a “just war,” where does that leave us? Where does this Libyan engagement fit into that?
It helps a bit to look at history – I think most of us would consider the Civil War and World War II to be, at least to some degree, “just” wars. But again, it only helps a bit.
If you’re building a moral equation, there are a lot of variables to fit together:
- Is it a defensive or an offensive war?
- If it is waged in the defense of others, is it fundamentally an offensive or defensive war, or something else – and what would the moral character of that “something else” be?
- Can we rely on the information we are receiving with which we use to make our judgements of the action’s relative “justness?”
- What are the long-term consequences of a given degree of engagement?
- What do we stand to lose as a nation, or as a group of individual communities (separate things)?
- If it’s “right,” how moral is it to consider the various consequences?
- If there is a degree of “just” military engagement, what if we cannot trust our government not to engage further to an “unjust” degree once that door is opened? Should that matter in deciding on a morally acceptable degree of violent intervention?
- What about financial cost? Should that enter into a moral calculus?
- What is the moral quality of those we purport to intervene on behalf of? How much does that matter?
- How confident should we feel that our engagement would lead to an improvement in the short or long term if we choose to intervene?
- Do we, as a nation or culture, bear some responsibility for the situation that is now creating violence?
I feel like I could go on forever now that I’ve started, but I’ll just stop there and turn it over, because I don’t have any easy answers. I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure how to feel about this engagement in Libya. I know that will horrify folks, but the situation itself seems morally clear – what is less clear is what the consequences of our involvement could be, and I’m still trying to work that out – as well as work out how much that matters, in a case where the good guy/bad guy equation really does seem so clear cut.
In all such things, I am primarily morally moved by the Golden Rule, and I do find myself wishing that, if the tables were turned, someone would intervene for me and mine.
Did I join the military when I was of age, though? Thought about it – but decided I would not join a force that was so regularly used for political purposes that I did not agree with. I always said if there were a military branch I could join that would only engage itself with the defense of our borders, I wouldn’t simply sign up, I would feel morally obligated to. But given that stand, do I have any business pretending to support any military intervention outside our borders at all?
Tricky stuff, and I bring it up to spur discussion, and fully expecting a range of viewpoints (or maybe not – what do I know?).
What do you think?
Life is easier if you’re a pacifist.
No, really. Pacifism is a one-size-fits-all, absolute moral code. No warring, no-way, no-how. No cost-benefit equation, risk analysis, or elaborate moral criteria required. You can spend absolutely zero time hung up on the value of a given conflict and more on to other things.
That’s probably the largest amount of horseshit you’ve ever heaped onto a blog. It’s almost like you could’ve started your post 2 grafs later and not sounded ignorant or dismissive of a philosophy that doesn’t fit into your little cartoon caricature!
I knew when I posted my “tantrum” that people would get huffy and indignant about my tone. Suffice to say, I didn’t have time or energy to post the necessary long, ignorance-busting comment that is necessary, but I wanted to weigh in, at the very least expressing my anger and throwing off any possible misconceptions about the type of demure person who engages in “pacifism” (your first glaring error in terminology, BTW).
Pacifism, as I understand it, is not a get out war free card, it’s a discipline than can even get one killed. It is not to be confused with cowardice. The problem with violence/force is that once it becomes part of one’s tool kit, it becomes easier and easier to use. One of the reasons for the militarism and violence in American society comes from the resort to war that was the American revolution. Was it justified? Canada, Australia, New Zealand are much more peaceful yet independent through an evolutionary process. Did Britain learn its lesson from the American Revolution? Perhaps.
But violence in the US also comes out of slavery which has governed so much of Southern behavior.
We think of Gandhi’s non-violence. But Gandhi was there at the foundation of the ANC and the Congress Party of India. Note the name comes from our own Continental Congress. My point here: pacifism is engagé not dégagé as John implies.
All societies need police. Police intervene, if possible, to stop violence before it plays itself out in murder.
I know the phrase has been misused, but I think of Libya as a police action. As well, the rebels started the rebellion peacefully. That’s important.
The old cliché of ballots not bullets misses the in between. To take up arms against a tyrant is legitimate, but it is clear to me that in Libya the rebels have only taken that step when attacked. In the cities they controlled there are no reports that they rounded up supporters of the regime and shot them. That’s important.
Force should be a last resort. I think it is in the case of Libya
Gonna do this piecemeal because it’s easier than writing a long comment, and we can compartmentalize responses to details before discussing the overarching philosophical issues.
I’ll start by point everybody to David McReynolds’ seminal work, The Philosophy of Nonviolence: http://www.cyberspacei.com/jes…
And now, my first objection to odum’s post (not to odum himself, mind).
Pacifist.
I fucking hate that word. It’s a bullshit word. It immediately paints a person as passive, and allows one to easily dismiss them as unserious, wimpy, whatever. That’s why (Godwin Alert) Goring said:
“The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
Pacifist don’t want to solve the grave problems of [insert latest pet project country’s] civilians being brutalized/murdered/oppressed. Pacifists think we just have to sing Kumbaya. Pacifists are starry-eyed dreamers, and we in the real world know that sometimes you just gotta fuck somebody’s shit UP!
I ain’t a pacifist, and neither is anybody I know who works on peace and justice issues. It trips off the tongue/keyboard nicely, but it obscures what’s really at the heart of the matter: that we Nonviolent Actionists (I want to use NVA for short, but there’s an obvious problem) seek more practical solutions to the world’s problems than violence.
Gandhi always regretted coining the phrase “passive resistance” for similar reasons. He believed in active, aggressive fighting through nonviolent means. So he started using ‘satyagraha’ as a term of art, but in the US that doesn’t have much meaning.
Anyway, correct your first sin: don’t fucking say ‘pacifist’ or I’ll piss on your post again. And I won’t be so nice next time.
More to come…
2nd sin: saying life is easier as a pacifist.
Look, I blog too, you know? I’ve got, like, eleventy thousand sites of my own and I post at gajillions of others. I understand you want a good hook, that it’s easier to elide complexity, etc.
But really, life’s easier as a pacifist? Ha! I’d submit it’s easier to accept violence as a tool. Then you as a citizen can always play the same card that Presidents have played since the beginning of the Republic: “hey, we love peace, but sometimes you just gotta bomb somebody because they’re wicked bad.”
Really, check out War Made Easy:
* The official film site: http://www.warmadeeasythemovie…
* Stream the whole thing for free: http://video.google.com/videop…
* Most germane segment on YouTube:
As Ed observed in this thread: “The problem with violence/force is that once it becomes part of one’s tool kit, it becomes easier and easier to use.”
Having a standing army makes it easy for Presidents to launch “little” operations that cost a few hundred million bucks the first few days. And it makes it easy for people who are ostensibly anti-war to go along with it.
More to come…
Not really. Maybe in the misapprehended, caricatured version that most people have in their heads, but not in reality.
Quakers are oft called “pacifists”. Yet hundreds went to fight in WWII. Why? Because they determined after much thoughtful examination of what was at stake that their stance on violence never anticipated the great evil set loose and that the only response was violence.
Gandhi himself observed: “Violence is any day preferable to impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent.”
CRAZY!
The so-called pacifism you use as a foil is less real than the Higgs-boson. It exists only in movies and the pens of pundits and those who sadly never have been educated about nonviolence.
It is not a monolithic philosophy, nor is it even just a philosophy, but a framework for active problem-solving. Put a bunch of people you would call “pacifists” in a room, and most likely they’d agree on the ends, but in my experience not on the means.
Is war in their toolkit? Probably not. But hey, it lurks everywhere in our world. As you said, it’s what people do. So even people who don’t accept violence as a valid way of resolving conflict might at some point throw up their hands and give in to the insanity. Because it’s there.
No warring, no-way, no-how. No cost-benefit equation, risk analysis, or elaborate moral criteria required. You can spend absolutely zero time hung up on the value of a given conflict and move on to other things.
Actually, all the cost-benefit, risk analysis and moral criteria were all taken into consideration up front. So NVAs have done their examination of history, considered where a line could be crossed justifying violence, etc, and have found all arguments wanting.
But there’s also a problem with the assumptions in this graf, in that you think we don’t still make those calculations. You do seem to operate under the assumption that we are religious about this, that we won’t listen to arguments or data, and thus are knee-jerk in our responses and close-minded. That is not the way of ‘satyagraha’ nor most actionists I’ve come across.
Yes, our conclusions generally end up at the same place: war isn’t the answer. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t considered, well, maybe this time there is no alternative.
But when you have already decided we don’t put thought into it, you can easily dismiss us as religious/doctrinaire/whatever. Then you can whine about the ironic use of the word ‘sin’ and ignore anything else somebody says. Hmm…
Seriously, is there no alternative to bombing Libya? And if not, why are we not “protecting” civilians in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, et al?
I don’t mean to charge anybody with hypocrisy. That’s a stupid tack, and makes all sorts of other assumptions similar to what I object to in odum’s piece. I just want folks to consider why violence is acceptable as a solution in this instance, but not in the others.
The big problem for me is that we’ve just seen 2 great examples of nonviolent regime change coming from the people of Tunisia and Egypt, in the 25th anniversary year of the People Power revolution in the Philippines. We rightly didn’t intervene there and the movements were successful.
Of course, Libya is different in that it’s essentially spiraled into civil war, but that brings up the other issue: violent rebellions rarely succeed. Really, there’s data and everything:
Our findings [using data on major resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006] show that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns.
So perhaps when there’s conflict, we should be asking at the beginning when it’s still nonviolent, how we might support the movement (if we think intervention is in our job description). Albright called America “the indispensible nation.” This was at a time when we’d ignored a decade of nonviolent resistance in Kosovo, and we only got involved when things got nasty, then we killed Serbians for the sins of their government. Interestingly enough, Gene Sharp (first person to catalog the 198 Methods of Nonviolent Resistance: http://www.paxamericana.net/19… intervened in Serbia and helped Otpor nonviolently overthrow Milosevic.
Anyway, if you take the easy philosophical route and accept warmaking as a legitimate response at some point, then you really never have the impetus to find all means of conflict resolution. That’s why I’d very much like to see Dennis Kucinich’s Dept of Peace implemented. Have a component in our government that looks at nonviolence as an organizing principle domestically and in terms of foreign policy. Make nonviolence your default posture and you see all sorts of other approaches.
Sadly, in our school system we usually get a passing mention of Gandhi and King, and then we continue on our merry way learning history as a series of wars.
Check out A Force More Powerful and you’ll find there are myriad examples of successful and unsuccessful NV campaigns against the most brutal regimes we’ve ever seen: http://www.aforcemorepowerful….
Now an objection I hear when I bring up examples in, say…Nazi Germany is that well, those efforts didn’t stop the Holocaust. My response is that if more people had been aware of NV alternatives, we could very well have stopped that evil.
There are 22,000 people declared Righteous Among The Nations. People like Schindler, who risked their lives to save thousands. Extrapolate. Multiply that by 10 or 100 and see how many you save.
Now the larger problem is how can we apply individual or group action like this to state actors? How could a power like the US use such methods? That’s where the Dept of Peace would come in. We’ve spent many aeons researching and perfecting warfare, but very little time figuring out nonviolent methods. And even in that short time, we have many people who somehow figured it out through trial and error. Maybe we could learn from that.
I’ve explained my personal objections to what odum posted, posted some information, and hope that clarifies a bit. This is a big fucking issue, and I really don’t know what my friend was expecting, but that’s blogging: a few throwaway lines can cause quite a ruckus sometimes.
Again, I highly recommend David McReynolds’ stuff:
http://www.cyberspacei.com/jes…
Don’t be fooled by the Jesus shit on the site. That just happens to be a place I was able to find his writing available online (used to be at a Quaker site, but that place is now defunct). He lays things out quite rationally, and doesn’t once use the word ‘sin’ or ‘fuck’, which is a weakness I overlook because otherwise he’s spot on.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to do some googling to see where else odum has used the word “pacifist” so I can bother him all over the intertubes…
Where is the evidence that we’re fighting a dictator who is brutal AND who facing a truly homegrown resistance motivated by a desire for basic rights and freedom? I’ve seen no clear evidence of who the “rebels” are and what their goals are. Isn’t it possible that we’re merely supporting the substitution of one group of thugs for another? Is it possibly a mistake to think that Libya is the same as Egypt or Tunisia?
A few misconceptions about NV (http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/misconceptions.pdf):
1) Nonviolent action has nothing to do with passivity, submissiveness, and cowardice; just as in violent action, these must first be rejected and overcome.
2) Nonviolent action is not to be equated with verbal or purely psychological persuasion, although it may use action to induce psychological pressures for attitude change; nonviolent action, instead of words, is a sanction and technique of struggle involving the use of social, economic, and political power, and the matching of forces in conflict.
…
7) In nonviolent action there is no assumption that the opponent will refrain from using violence against nonviolent actionists; the technique is designed to operate against violence when necessary.
I mentioned him as a quick stand-in for all resistance because he not only did “the decent thing” in the face of evil, but is fairly recognizable in our popular culture.
Of course, Spielberg’s movie elides, conflates, and all the usual stuff you find in what is, of course, not a documentary but a dramatic work. Schindler was in fact arrested multiple times, and his Nazi friends actually recognized a certain sympathy for his workers, amongst other things. So he took great personal risks to do what he thought was right, while other factory owners found their own limits or outright refused to stick their necks out.
Read the book, or better yet his biography, and you’ll get a more complete picture of not only Schindler’s actions but also of many courageous Jews who resisted in a variety of dangerous ways to save literally thousands of people.
With that as backdrop, I find the objection “but the Nazis shot people” to be less than compelling. They killed many millions of people anyway, whether they resisted or not. Consider the Judenrate cooperating with the regime–at the time it made a great deal of sense, but if we want to learn from history we’ll see that strategy didn’t prevent genocide and essentially facilitated it.
The problem was that it was sort of the “we always fight the last war” syndrome. Such practices worked throughout the history of Jews in Europe, but of course the new threat was vastly different on many levels, and people didn’t really recognize it until it was far too late. Schindler’s List, BTW, encapsulates that very well in the opening restaurant scene where one Nazi observes, “this storm is different: this is not the Romans, this storm is the SS.”
The Holocaust was a perfect example of Hitler’s maxim in Mein Kampf about submitted demands in installments. The (wholly scientifically inaccurate) analogy of a frog in boiling water helps understand the point.
Even in late stages of WWII there were examples of active NV resistance, such as the Rosenstrasse (http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/book/excerpts/denmark.php), but those tactical successes couldn’t do as much as a strategic approach much earlier in the conflict. So the key is to begin non-cooperation as early as possible, ala in Kosovo in the 80s.
So I stand by the idea that NV resistance could’ve worked against the Nazis. Not guaranteed, but you double your odds over violent resistance (and of course have infinity times more chance of succeeding than doing nothing). Of course, nobody really knew this back then, but we’re talking about learning and applying lessons in the present, when we do have the data. And we can now try to figure out how state actors can use the same/similar tools as resistance movements have.
…one thing: notice what I got pissed about. Not your belief that war might be justified and effective. I was pissed off about your opening grafs which I think were unnecessary and painted with too broad a brush. I haven’t attacked anybody for their beliefs in violence and have only been trying to make a case for my piece of reality.
I went away for a few hours and came back to this tome of argument…and actually, no one seems to be in real honest-to-goodness disagreement about much other than semantics.
Todd, I think you over-reacted out-of-the-gate. I get what you’re saying and it all has validity (at least as far as I can penetrate); but it reads like you must have been already primed for an argument when you started reading Odum’s post. I think he might have chosen his words more carefully had he known what was coming for him, but distilled down to the simple sense of the thing, he was just waxing wistful. We are so conditioned to thinking an action is either right or wrong; and being who we are, we crave to know with some certainty where our principled stand should be on Libya. What Odum is saying, and what many of us are thinking, is that this is not easy for anyone who takes the position that violent intervention is ever justified.
I have another perspective on this question that is probably no more helpful. Assuming for the moment that violent intervention is sometimes justified, I question whether the U.S. rising so predictably to “distress calls” in distant lands isn’t enabling nearer nations to abdicate their responsibility more and more easily. So beyond the issues of whether or not we know exactly where this is leading and with whom we have thrown-in, there is that underlying question of enabling. We do it for a lot of reasons, both noble and ignoble and they’re all mixed-up together. We are at once an emotional nation, wearing our official heart on our sleeve and spouting high-sounding and high-feeling rhetoric about protecting the downtrodden, and a calculating engine of strategy and commerce. So our response is always a little schizophrenic and unresolved. My sense is that this is not helping anyone in the long-run because we always lack the critical ability to break clean at the right moment. We’re addicted to our own sentimental script and the faded glory of American intervention history. Our so-called “allies” in the region know that and play us like a tin piano.
I think what Todd is talking about is a change in the culture, which (if there were a time-machine we could use to administer the lessons of hind-sight) might be altered by myriad conscious decisions of individuals participating non-violently to effect a more humane society. Since we don’t have such a time-machine, if we are going to effect those changes we can only do so in anticipation of the distant future, resolving to take violent intervention off the table entirely. This is a tough call because it requires a lot of creative thinking and superior strategizing to replace readily available brute force and intimidation.
Women know all about the glacial speed at which caveman culture is evolving…and we have yet to take up arms to get us to a better place. But so long as the world is run by men, it will be run by men; and I don’t see violence taking a back-seat anytime soon.
Todd, I think you over-reacted out-of-the-gate.
I already apologized for that. I admit I got very angry when I read his opening grafs. What can I say? I ain’t a saint.
I think what Todd is talking about is a change in the culture
Absofuckinglutely. Thank you.
this is not easy for anyone who takes the position that violent intervention is ever justified.
It ain’t easy for people who don’t think violent intervention is justified when there are all sorts of emotional arguments for it (HE GASSED HIS OWN PEOPLE, etc). That was a big source of my umbrage: that it’s somehow easy to be a practitioner/believe in NV. No need to compare “suffering” from where I sit. The fucking situation sucks, no matter how you approach it.