Pacifism and Nonviolence

Pacifism ranges from advocacy of peaceful means of resolving conflicts through calls for abolition of war and military forces and opposition to any form of government (anarchistic pacifism) to opposition to violence under any circumstance, even in self-defense.

With the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, France degenerated into a chaos of wars between local lords. In efforts to reduce the violence, in 989 local clergy proclaimed the Peace of God (Pax Dei) threatening excommunication first for attacking priests, then noncombatants, later adding children and women, and finally merchants and their goods to the protected classes, while prohibiting specific acts such as invading churches or burning houses. It was ineffective. The Truce of God (Treuga Dei), first proclaimed in Roussillon and Catalonia in 1027, tried to limit the fighting by prohibiting war on Sundays. It was extended to Saturday in memory of the Resurrection, then to Friday in memory of the Passion, and then to Thursday in memory of the Ascension. It was extended to other consecrated days and periods, such as Advent through Epiphany and Mardi Gras through Easter. Ultimately, if only hypothetically, it left only 80 noncontiguous days each year for war, twice the usual period of feudal service. In theory, the Truce of God was enforced by penance, exile (for up to thirty years), and excommunication. It applied to most of France, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries for about two centuries, by which time kings and dukes were again becoming capable of enforcing peace within their own domains. Magna Carta (1215) was part of this process, the barons giving up the right to make private war in exchange for the protection of rights enumerated in the document (Knight 2003, Thompson & Johnson 1937).

Most present-day Christians support the idea that war is regrettable but unavoidable and should be fought according to Just War principles (Chapter 13). The Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, Seventh Day Adventists, and Society of Friends (Quakers), the “peace churches,” have a long tradition of pacifist belief and action. In 1660, the Quakers declared to Charles II:

We utterly deny all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretense whatever; this is our testimony to the whole world. The Spirit of Christ by which we are guided is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil, and again to move unto it; and we certainly know, and testify to the world, that the Spirit of Christ, which leads us into all truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.

Western pacifism is largely rooted in obedience to Jesus’s example of self-sacrifice. Many are willing to die but not to kill for their beliefs. Many resolved the dilemma of their duty as citizens in war with their duty to their by seeking alternative ways to serve, often as medics or in ambulance units. Many served heroically and among Americans two received the Medal of Honor.¹⁷

In 1934, Hitler’s second year as chancellor, A. A. Milne proposed a thought experiment in “The Pacifist Spirit.” The leaders of England, France, Germany, and Italy were to be killed if they led their country into war, even in self-defense against a fifth leader not subject to the same constraint. He concludes that “there would be no more war if the makers of it were always the first victims,” proving to his satisfaction that war is not a “biological necessity.”

Milne never says who is to do the killings. There are other causes of war (Chapter 12), with fellow pacifist William James’s (1906) assuming that glory and pillage motivate it. The problem with “thought experiments” is that, like the plot of a novel, they tend to come out the way the author wants.

Pacifism is not passive. Nonviolence requires courage and action. Jeanette Rankin’s votes in the US Congress against both WWI and WWII are examples of belief put into practice. Gandhi, King, Mandela, and Thoreau were imprisoned for their beliefs. Each ultimately made progress but Gandhi and King suffered setbacks when followers could not be controlled and turned to violence in contradiction of their principles, and Mandela sometimes reverted to force so really followed a mixed strategy (Chapter 17).

Martin Luther King, Jr., (1963) specifies six requirements for nonviolent resistance. First, following Thoreau, it requires willingness to suffer consequences. Second, following Gandhi, nonviolent resistance requires courage and discipline. Third, its goal is friendship and reconciliation rather than victory. Fourth, it targets evil, not people. Fifth, one must not do violence to others or to one’s own spirit. Sixth, it requires faith that justice will triumph.

Holmes (1990) names six examples of successful nonviolent resistance. The first is a report by an anthropologist of an isolated tribe that frowns on disagreements of even the mildest sort. The second is that of Gandhi’s and his disciple Badshah Khan’s movements for Indian and Pushtun independence from Britain. The third is Norwegian and Dutch resistance against the Nazis. The fourth is Cesar Chavez’s farm labor movement in California, the fifth that of the Druze in the Golan Heights directed against the Israelis, and the sixth the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

Of these cases, the isolated tribe is irrelevant to modern conditions in which most people live in interdependent states participating in a world economy. Gandhi and Badshah Khan succeeded because Britain already had decided to abandon India because it no longer could afford the costs of empire. Integration had begun in the US Army, professional sports, the schools, and many workplaces over a decade before King began his work. Israel, the Philippines, and South Africa were nominally democratic and under intense international pressure. The Norwegian and Dutch resistance included elements that were not pacifists and succeeded only because of Allied armies fighting a conventional war. India, Pakistan, and South Africa often turned violent.

In “Nonviolent acts that break oppression’s chains,” Peter Ackerman¹⁸ (Christian Science Journal 2003) does not give one example of nonviolence succeeding against tyrants. Instead, he tells us of his hopes and why these methods should work in much the same way medieval scholastics argued that a spider as a manifestation of evil should not be able to pass a barrier of powdered unicorn horn, a manifestation of purity. Nobody successfully tried or survived nonviolent resistance against Hitler, Kim Il Sung, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, or Stalin for reasons that expose its limitations.

However, recent and ongoing nonviolent movements require that we reserve judgment. Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Movement in Poland and Vaclev Havel’s Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, both with considerable covert help from the United States, successfully opposed the dying Soviet Union. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine came under the dictatorship of Leonid Kuchma with the fall of the Soviet Union. He rid the country of his opponents by methods revealed when tape recordings became public of him ordering his Interior Minister to dispose of several individuals. This led to public and peaceful protests that created a viable opposition and prevented Kuchma’s nomination for a third presidential term. He rigged the election of his chosen successor so blatantly that tens of thousands of Ukrainians turned out in a sustained and peaceful protest that gained the backing of much of the world. The Ukrainian Supreme Court ordered new elections in December 2004, which were widely accepted as fair. As noted above, now and then peaceful revolutions are making fitful starts against other successor dictatorships in other former Soviet Satellites. Early in 2005, the Kyrgyz dictator fell to a peaceful protest. Members of the Varela Project and the Ladies in White continue to march in silent protest of Fidel Castro’s oppressive regime every Sunday. Nobel laureate Aung San Su Kyi’s nonviolent movement (Chapter 15) appears to be having moderate success in Myanmar. The Dalai Lama, also a Nobel laureate, leads one on behalf of but from outside Tibet.