Pacifism is an ideal, not a reality. I have read too many books and listened to too many podcasts, where human decency without force to back it is utterly crushed.
It ain’t nice to hurt people. But it is worse to be unable to harm the people who don’t care about being a good person.
You still have to fight those who would harm others because they view the as “other.” I feel an actual pacifist wouldn’t involve themselves in the fight but know someone else would have the fight that issue and wouldn’t admonish them.
not sure I agree and i think perhaps it’s a difference in definition, I’d say what he’s talking about as cowardice under my definition. We see this playing out in Ukraine by not going all in against Russia, similar by not being outraged about gaga we side with the fascists and Cuba, the random killing of fisherman in The Caribbean etc etc
but to me pacifism means the violence of war is a last resort, not the go to first reaction but if you must engage, go all in.
i think the biggest problem you’re going to have is agreeing on the definition of pacifist.
My understanding of history and pacifists, (which may or not be right), is that no pacifist movement has ever “won” a revolution by peaceful means themselves. It always takes a group of people who are willing to use violence and die in the process if need be to achieve the desired ends to back the pacifists up.
Popular modern peaceful movements led by people such as Martin Luther King in the US and Ghandi in colonial India were parallel backed by violent groups such as the Black Panthers in the US and a bunch of small and very active violent groups in India.
And the only reason we know and remember Ghandi and King and hold them up as shining examples of pacifism, is because the powers that be decided it was easier and more beneficial to negotiate with them rather than the more violent factions. After all, that could get you killed outright trying to negotiate with the violent leaders or at least totally ousted from power at best. Dealing with the pacifists was a good way to stay alive and maintain at least some power if not all of it. But until those in power are convinced they can die because enough of the population is actively trying to kill them, they don’t much care about talking to the pacifists. I mean, what are they going to do? Carry signs and march for a few days? Oh! The horror! If that worked, Trump would be in jail by now.
Until enough of the populace is angry enough to take up arms and risk death to kill those evil people in power, nothing will change. There will be no reason to make deals or vacate the power for the pacifists to occupy.
But there still remains the problem of the violent people the pacifists now need to deal with. And those people have the taste of blood. This is the weak point in any revolution…
Popular modern peaceful movements led by people such as Martin Luther King in the US and Ghandi in colonial India were parallel backed by violent groups such as the Black Panthers in the US and a bunch of small and very active violent groups in India.
Keep in mind with King (I’m not so studied up on Gandhi), optics played a big role. You had squeaky clean pillars of the community and schoolchildren being attacked by police dogs, hoses, and baton wielding police for daring to ask for equality. The US actually had decent journalism back then so they looked horrible on the world stage as the US was positioning itself as the leader of a free world. America’s arm was twisted into giving black people nominal rights with token representation while surreptitiously undermining both.
I’m not so sure the threat of armed black people made the government acquiesce. The state loves nothing more than a pretext for violence.
Popular modern peaceful movements led by people such as Martin Luther King in the US and Ghandi in colonial India were parallel backed by violent groups such as the Black Panthers in the US and a bunch of small and very active violent groups in India.
I’m not big on this area of history, but wasnt much of the “evil” of the black panther party just straight up propaganda from COINTELPRO and other federal programs designed to undermine and villify them via any means necessary to avoid having black people stand up for themselves, and having white people support them?
And ignores a lot of the public good they did feeding the needy and trying to cop watch in the era when there were no tiny pocket sized high resolution cameras with which to catch the police misdeeds on?
My thoughts when I read this question is that there are so many degrees of pacifism and so many degrees of being for or against something, “being against pacifism” is a meaninglessly binary concept. I mean, to some people pacifism means not being aggressive, while others reject all forms of violence and won’t hit back no matter how much they get hit. Orwell was specifically addressing how to deal with nazi Germany in the lead-up to WWII, not to pacifism as a peaceful attitude in general. Which pacifism are you talking about?
On social media complexity always gets reduced to swiping left/right or voting up/down. This very stark and false oversimplification, mostly for the sake of thinking less and scrolling faster, has trained us to reduce every issue to a 100% right side and a million % wrong one. Perfect good vs utter evil. Let’s not keep doing that.
Yeah. There‘s two kinds of people that need to be dealt with in a revolution. The ones that need to be removed, like the corrupt leadership, and the people telling the revolutionaries to stop because “we need to stop the violence and have peace” or whatever.
The former is obvious. The latter because they want to reestablish existing systems because they benefit from them. To dismantle them would be to harm their status. So you wind up basically letting “bygones be bygones” and just sweeping the corruption that cause all the problems under the rug in the name of peace while it continues quietly in the background. Nothing changes except the surface level view, the shitty people just try to stay below the radar.
So yeah, the “pacifists” are often just as bad, not because they’re actually against harming the corrupt people in the regime, but because they’re against harming their comfort zone. They’re protecting the status quo.
So, conditionally, I am against pacifism.
Or maybe they just believe in morality. The warrior, the politician, and the sadist talk about effectiveness as they wear the mask of the revolutionary. The pacifist says ‘I will not do evil, regardless of what prognosticators think it will lead to.’ In a way it can be called selfish, a refusal to dirty oneself by doing harm. In another, it is the most sincere adherence to the morals for which the others say they are fighting, allowing even their own death rather than hurting others. The pacifist and the liberal both say ‘peace’ but the liberal will pull a knife if you say no.
But to allow evil to be done by being pacifist, I suppose that some mental gymnastics help wash one’s hands of any responsibility for their inaction to prevent or stop such things? BTW, refusing to kill or cause harm as a conscientious objector is not the same as pacifism.
jorjor well
My pacifist grandfather served in the US army medical Corp in both WW2 and Korea. He saw some of the worst aspects of both of those conflicts, particularly Korea. I don’t think anyone would think that he was helping the Nazis by treating the wounded.
Most countries aren’t fascist enough to require anti fascist violence
Pacifism, like democracy and capitalism, are functional only if everyone participate in them in good faith. There was never in human history a group of people where everyone participated in something in good faith.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. It seems a pretty intractable problem that we’re surrounded by so many bad-faith actors. How do you ever, ever really progress like that.
you act in spite of the bad faith actors and hope you get enough people to follow your momentum
Changing the socioeconomic system so that bad actors are not incentivized would go a long way. Remove the profit motive, and these greedy psychopaths are reduced to mere assholes, who can safely be ignored.
Part of the “Universal Living” economic concept that I am cooking up, is built to make assholes want to leave the workforce. This is done by putting absolute caps on wealth, assets, and income. Anything beyond the limits is taxed 100%. Once a person has fully ‘topped off’ their personal wealth, they would be faced with the choice of either spending their time having fun with money, or working without fiscal reward.
Part of this also involves making it so that workers vote for the pay rank of leadership, and who gets placed or retained in leadership roles. Leaders also can’t own stocks and other fiscal instruments. There are multiple angles where rulemaking is concerned, to create a checks & balance to economic wealth and authority. We want bad people to not want to be leaders, having them just live their ‘best life’ without it needing to involve bullying other people.
Progress happens in spite of them, aye. Feudalism led to capitalism, while it is flawed, I’d say this is an upgrade. Capitalism originally embraced slavery, and while some aspects still exist today, mostly all capitalist governments have put massive blocks on it. Monarchism led to constitutional monarchism, the beginnings of the rule of law. Through this rule of law, democracy could be organized.
Thr next steps are entirely up to your opinion, yet I feel things will on average improve. There will be setbacks, yet onward we go.
Get rid of capitalism
Progress isn’t driven by peace and cooperation. Most of human inventions, improvements, everything you may call “progress of civilization” boils down to “how can we fuck over other people for our benefit”. No matter what kinda change you may try to call “positive progress” it was really someone profiting by fucking over others.
I want peace, and surrender is not peace.
… para bellum. Concept old as shit.
Yup.
Ultimately, pacifism isn’t about choosing to reject violence, it’s about choosing who is an acceptable target of the violence and the choice is made to appear as a non-choice by failing to categorize state violence as violence because you are not the current target of that violence. How many of the powerless should die to save the powerful from any consequences? I don’t think utilitarianism always makes the most sense, but I think this is a case where the math and morality should make it clear why this is a deeply flawed way of thinking.
Imo the worst pacifists are those that want to prevent others from being able to defend themselves.
If you’re going to be beat up and you chose to not attempt to defend yourself in any way, then I’ll think that you’re being stupid, but ultimately it’s your life, your choice.
But if someone else is going to be beat up, and you try to make sure that they won’t be able to defend themselves, then that makes you an accessory to the assault in my eyes.
There are many definitions of pacifism, and without further context to simply say someone is a pacifist automatically makes them a fascist is a pretty myopic point of view.
I am anti-war, and I prefer peaceful resolution over violence. By definition I am a pacifist. But, that does not mean I will let someone simply walk all over me or my loved ones without opposition. It doesn’t mean I will simply resort to violence either.
The world is a complicated place, and to treat everything as if it’s an “either, or” situation does everyone a disservice and only feeds into the overall problem.
I believe Orwell was speaking of the Spanish Revolution (1936), in which he fought on the side of the socialists.
Pacifism is a great ideal, and (I believe) a lot of conflicts can be solved by honest negotiation. Once the shooting starts, though, the time for pacifism has ended. In the US, right now, it’s not clear whether the shooting has started. I mean: ICE is definitely shooting people; people are definitely being injured and dying as result of the administration’s actions, but it’s not Shooting-shooting, and it still seems like avoidable, poor-policy harms. The question is: will it escalate to civil war level violence? And if it does, will strict pacifists already have blocked any hope of resistance?
He actually fought for the Anarchists, but they were on the same side.
Considering how this has gone for indiginous and black people of your country, who’ve been dealing with this problem for the last few hundred years, I don’t think the issue is with the pacifists/non violent activists on your side. It’s with the sheer fucking scale of the power imbalance you’re facing.
Like yeah there’s now more people in your country being shot at, but the people doing the shooting still have significantly more power.
Are there enough of you collectively now being shot at, to be able to take on the basically all of capitalism that’s backing your government, funding your millitary, and controlling your economy?
It’s fucking bleak thinking about this stuff. Like even with more Luigi’s, how many will it take before the people holding the cards to make things considerably worse for most of society?
I’ve had this comic saved in my phone for a while now and it seems relevant. What with how well he predicted the future, Orwell being so against pacifists is painfully ironic.
Yeah, Orwell had the clarity of fighting against a literal right wing coup. A clear, decisive event to separate the non-violent time from the violent time, and violence instigated by people without even nominal consent of The People.
The slow rise of militancy, matched with spreading desperation, at least so far lacks a trigger. And in the particular case of the US, we have, like, 30 shootings a day just being us. That makes it a lot less shocking when a couple of those are government shootings. We let the right wingers take over the government (arguably, 250 years ago), and they’re just slowly boiling the frog.
The frog jumps out, what does that make us?
If you want the real answer…
spoiler
I don’t have the reference handy, but the gist is: They use pithed frogs, and they do not jump out of slowly heated water. Intact frogs do jump out, but you can’t know if that’s because of the heat or some other random frog thought. Frogs have really elaborate reflex systems (eg: wiping reflex ), and a pithed frog given a sudden, large noxious stimulation will do something a lot like a jump, but the neural pathways accommodate to a slowly changing stimulus and fail to elicit movement.
I’m in the UK and while shit is obviously different here, it’s still very much the same in some respects. We’re all slowly being boiled and there’s basically nothing we can really do.
🙏
It appears Orwell is referring to the “pacifists” that think any violence ever, even in self defense, is bad. A radical pacifist, if you will.
Get out of here with your nuance!
pacifism <> anti-militarist <> non-violence
However depending on how you define those, you may recognize in each one. If we rely on a legal definition, militarism and war are only link to states. Armed force without state are not an army, and armed conflicts no declared by states are not war. Dumb lex, sed lex
For exemple, in this definition revolution is not a war, so pacifist could took part in armed force independent from states. That explain why their is a pacifist tradition in communism … except when those revolution succeed … well you should leave that armed force that became an army and refuse conscription.
This debate occurred recently through the essay “How Nonviolence Protects the State”, which address the non-violence and/or pacifism as exploiters : if you don’t want to use violence, other will have to The essay do not get rid of the ideal of non-violence, only what individual position do to people that could not choose.
Now their is an Elephant in the room : police. A violent armed force, acting for a state but without a declaration of war. So from our first definition, we could be a pacifist and let the cops do the exact same thing that an army.
