Pacifism, almost always

THIS WAS WRITTEN A LONG TIME AGO, IN SEPTEMBER OF 2001, SHORTLY AFTER "9/11"

I've grappled with the issue of pacifism over the years. Where I have ended up personally is that violence is not always wrong, but that in real-world situations people usually jump to violence too soon.

When people weigh in on what to do about our war against terrorism, I imagine a giant see-saw. If you know which way you want it to tilt, it's pretty easy to just jump on the end. To the degree that we have a voice in what the final national policy is, it doesn't matter that much whether we give a carefully nuanced position about exactly what the final tilt of the see-saw should be. But if each of us imagines that we are suddenly thrust into the decision-maker's chair and we are making the final decision, opinions might converge a little more. Good intelligence tells you there are 50 terrorists finalizing plans for a new wave of terror at a remote location in a hostile country, and you can prove it, and they will disperse shortly. I would authorize the air strike to kill them, and maybe some ofthe others who jumped on the pacifist end of the see-saw would too. On the other hand, some of those who have advocated massive indiscriminate bombing of Afghanistan (none from within FUSN so far) might decide against it if the final responsibility for the attack fell on them (this I fervently hope).

The real situations will fall in the middle between those extremes. I am somewhat comforted to think that our intelligence services, state department, and military are staffed with enough non-partisan professionals that they will veto a wide range of actions that would by any reasonable measure turn out badly. I could be eating my words shortly, but I think they realize that air strikes that kill thousands of civilians, or trying to invade and then actually rule any part of a hostile country such asAfghanistan or Iraq would be hugely counterproductive. They may still undertake missions that turn out badly, or that I will find immoral, but the fact that our government has waited a week without lashing out is a good sign that the worst mistakes have been avoided.

One other perspective that might bridge the gap between us at FUSN is to think about our goal. Here's a suggestion: We want the best future world we can have. Could we agree that actual terrorist organizers should be in jail if the alternative is that they are walking free? Could we agree that we want to minimize future terrorism? Could we agree that we want to minimize loss of innocent lives? If so, then our differences are about means rather than about ends. (I realize that varying importance attached to these goals is still an area for disagreements, but it's a start.) Some people might argue that we should seek revenge even if we know that it will lead to increased terrorism in the future, because revenge is an end in itself; I strongly disagree with this. For those who feel that strong revenge will lead to a better future world situation, I may disagree but I do see it as an empirical question and I respect your view.

In the early 1970s I applied for and got a CO (conscientious objector) status from my draft board. With draft number 35, I would have done alternative service had draft call-ups not been ended my year. For a couple years right after college, I considered myself a Quaker, and as many of you will know, there is a strong peace testimony in Quakerism which is often taken as absolute. One note from history is interesting: after the Quakers settled the Delaware Valley, an enterprising band of pirates discovered this was a great place to operate since the pacifist Quakers put up no defense. After much soul-searching, the Quakers hired some mercenaries to hunt down the pirates by what they surely knew would be violent means.

Some of us have quoted Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, great people who achieved great things with nonviolent resistance. But the success they enjoyed in particular circumstances hardly settles any general question. Quotations rarely do, even (especially?) quotations attributed to God.

I was also very interested in social justice from a leftist perspective during the 1976-86 period, and there were many opportunities to think about the role of violence in those struggles. For a while I thought violence as a means to ending apartheid in South Africa might be justified, but as history has turned out, it seems like it was not. The vast majority of leftist guerrilla movements have turned out badly, whether they ultimately lost or won. The brutal Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union played a major role in defeating Nazi Germany, and then became the less brutal Brezhnev regime and ultimately disintegrated into its component republics -- all without external violence.

It took me a long time to find a war where I could easily see myself picking up a gun and heading off to the front, but I found a pretty clear case during the Bosnia war: if I had been a Muslim resident of Sarajevo during the Serbian siege, I would have been able to go off and defend the trenches with a clear conscience. The price of failure in that violent struggle would be the killing or expulsion of my people from their home. It's much harder for me to judge earlier wars because I have only the information supplied by history, not the information available at the time.