Five Myths About Pacifism

Since 1982 when I began teaching courses on pacifism and nonviolence, more than 8,000 students have been in my classes. I’ve also had 8,000 students who come into class the first day hived up with one or more myths about pacifism--the belief--and nonviolence, the method. That they have bought into them is less the result of tacit agreement than having an academic background void of the study of peacemaking or peacemakers. As a result, too often they accept the idea that violence can stop violence, without being seriously exposed to the view that instead of fighting fire with fire, fight fire with water: pacifism and nonviolence being the water.

This school year, as in most past years, my classes are at Georgetown University Law Center, American University, the University of Maryland, the Washington Center for Internships and Academic, Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School and Wilson High School. This year, the same myths are returning.

Pacifism is passivity.

Hardly. The lives of both the well-known pacifists--Gandhi, Dorothy Day, the Berrigan brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr.--and lesser-knowns like Emily Balch, Scott Nearing and David Dellinger--were tirelessly centered on action and risk-taking. In defiance of one raj or another, their conscience-driven activism led to consequences ranging from imprisonment and death to scorn and isolation. Instead of Choosing organizing over agonizing, pacifists have taken to the front lines with a deep arsenal of nonviolent weapons: fasts, boycotts, strikes, marches, sit-ins, civil disobedience, war tax refusal, defiance of blockades, non-cooperation with power. Recalling the October 21, 1967 anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon, Robert McNamara said: “I could not help but think that had the protestors been more disciplined--Gandhi-like--they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down.”

Pacifism is about as effective as sticking flowers in gun barrels.

In only the past 25 years at least six brutal governments have been brought down by well-disciplined citizens who regime-changed without shooting bullets or dropping bombs.

--On Feb. 26, 1986 a frightened Ferdinand Marcos, a U.S. supported dictator, fled the Philippines. Nuns, students and workers staged a three-year nonviolent revolt.

--On Oct. 5, 1988 Chile’s despot, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, another U.S. favorite, was driven from office after five years of strikes, boycotts and other forms of demands for free elections. A Chilean organizer said: “We didn’t protest with arms. That gave us more power.”

--On Aug. 4, 1989 in Poland the Soviet puppet, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, fell. Few resisters were killed during the nine year struggle led by future Nobel Prize winner Lech Walensa.. The example of Poland’s successful nonviolence spread, with the Soviet Union

collapse soon coming.

--On May 10, 1994, Nelson Mandela, a former political prisoner, became the president of South Africa. Years of patient boycotts ended white supremacy.

--On April 1, 2001 in Yugoslavia, a two year student-led strike saw Serbian police arrest Slobodan Milosevic for his crimes.

--On Nov. 23, 2003 the bloodless revolution of roses toppled Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze.

It was the moral power of justice, the strength of will and the toughness of patience, and not weapons of steel, that brought reform.

Pacifists are parasites who refuse to serve their country while enjoying freedoms that soldiers died protecting.

In hundreds of ways and hundreds of professions, pacifists serve their country. The enemies they face are disease, poverty, discrimination, ignorance, hunger. In bravely serving their country what they object to is serving those who run their country: leaders who believe they can kill their way to peace, who believe that violence can end violence. They side with Hannah Arendt: “Violence, like all action, changes the world but the most probably change is to more violent world.” The violence that pacifists oppose goes well beyond military violence. It includes domestic violence, environmental violence, racial violence, economic violence, sexual violence, governmental violence, legal and illegal violence, homophobic violence, corporate violence, street violence, police violence. Those, too, are war zones where peacemakers are killed and sacrifices made that can equal the heroism found on military battlefields.

It was military might, not pacifism, that defeated Hitler.

Not exactly. Examples abound, both large and small, in Denmark, Holland, Norway, France and elsewhere, in which nonviolent resistance defied the Nazi onslaught. In those places, Gene Sharp writes in “The Politics of Nonviolent Action,” “patriots resisted their Nazi overlords and internal puppets by such weapons as underground newspapers, labor slowdowns, general strikes, refusal of collaboration, special boycotts of German troops and quislings, and non-cooperation with fascist controls and efforts to restructure their societies institutions.”

The defiance tended to be hastily organized and was not widespread. If the opposite were true—if Hitler was resisted in the late 1920s, not the early 1940s, and in more places, the war’s death toll might have been much lower. Howard Zinn argues: “Whatever alternative scenarios we can imagine to replace World War II and its mountain of corpses, it really doesn’t matter anymore. The practical effect of declaring World War II just is not for that war but for the wars that followed….The worst consequence of World War II is that it kept alive the idea that war could be just.”

Pacifists think they are morally superior.

Having known, interviewed or read the books of hundreds of pacifists--alphabetically from Joan Baez to Howard Zinn--I’ve found the opposite to be true. Genuine pacifists shy from the label, knowing that however ill at ease they are in a society where violence prevails they may be complicit. If they pay federal income taxes, they know that a major portion goes for America’s wars. If they travel by car, bus or plane, or any means except foot or bicycle, they know that the emissions do violence to the environment. If they eat meat, eggs or dairy products, they know that killing or exploiting animals is involved. If they pay to read The Washington Post, whose editorials endorse both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, they know the paper accepts advertising money from military contractors, environmental polluters and assorted despoilers.

If you come across some pacifists claiming moral superiority, unsaddle them from their high horses. Be peaceful and break no bones, of course.

Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington D.C.