Bleg on WWII English pacifism:
I believe I have read--but I can't recall where-- that during the Second World War, some English pacifists proposed that when the Nazi troops arrived in England, unopposed by military resistance (thanks to pacifist policy), they should be greeted with Christian love. Such a greeting would be disarming, and the Nazis, seeing that the invaded population were Christian friends rather than belligerents, would realize the error of the war-like Nazi ways.
Does anyone have a citation or other information about this proposal?
MORE BLEG: How a good article or book chapter on Frantz Fanon's influence in promoting racist violence and other terrorism? There's mention of this scattered in many sources, but how about a consolidated, extended treatment?
The subject is closely linked to Gandhi's position during the war, which was that the British should quit India and that after being occupied by the Japanese the Indians should respond with satyagraha (passive resistance). Gandhi's virtue of honesty, however, had him quite ready to concede that this approach would cost millions of Indian casualties, before the Japanese would see the light. (George Orwell's famous essay on Gandhi touches on this subject and also the related subject of Gandhi's willingness, unlike most pacifists, to address the question of what would happen to European Jews if the Allies dropped out of the war. Gandhi's position was that European Jews should all commit suicide, by way of protest and awakening the conscience of the world.)
Nonsense.
One of their pitches was that armies can't work when they're full of psychotic murderers instead of normal soldiers. Thus, we have nothing to worry about when we allow ourselves to be occupied. Historical reality means nothing to these people, although I get the impression the really hope it means nothing to the rest of us. They're wrong. I hope.
Real pacifists know very well what will happen to them and do it anyway because they believe that doing violence, even in self-defense or in defense of others, threatens their immortal souls.
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
but I do know that in one of the collections of essays/speeches given by C.S. Lewis, there is a speech titled Why I am not a Pacifist, given to a Pacifist society in England. I believe this event occurred while England was involved in WWII, though I may be wrong...
If Lewis accurately portrayed the arguments of the Pacifist society, then they were as deluded as ideas mentioned by Dave Kopel. (The arguments seemed be along the lines of "War is always worse than peace, Jesus told us to love our enemies, and it is more moral to be at peace than to wage war." Lewis spends a long time discussing what moral reasoning is--it almost rates as a separate speech on a separate subject--before using moral reasoning and historical study to pull apart the arguments mentioned.)
This might count as weak supporting evidence, especially if the papers of that particular Pacifist society can be produced.
I believe the "poem" is a collection from several speeches given by Niemoller after the war, one at least was a commencement exercise. (IIRC)
There are quite a few stories of English women greeting downed German pilots with cups of tea, which they drank while awaiting the arrival of the authorities. It's not an indication of pacifism, but of good manners.
It is rare, my paperback copy is by Dolphin Books, edition 1962 and took me some time and money to acquire. The original is copyright 1940 by Wilfred Funk, Inc. A comprehensive university library MAY have a copy. I say "may" because it would be considered politically incorrect in todays university culture. "JFK" notwithstanding. In it, JFK makes considerable mention of the influence of the English pacifists as well as the labor unions resistance Britain's to re-armament.
As you were.
In it, JFK makes considerable mention of the influence of the English pacifists, as well as the labor unions resistance to Britain's re-armament.
Worked well against the Romans.
At the time in Germany to which Niemoller refers, those who actually did speak out, but offered no violent resistance, included Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, Inge Scholl, Kurt Huber, Alex Schmorell, Willi Graf, and Christoph Probst. They called their group The White Rose.
Of course, such a Christian is also committed to the idea that sufferings in this world are as nothing compared to the glories of Heaven (or the torments of Hell, for that matter). If one's family is tortured and killed, they are destined for a better place where every tear shall be wiped dry.
One can, and perhaps should, disagree with that point of view, but it is a bit strange to hold it in utter contempt, as several folks on this thread appear to do.
One notable example of someone who began as a Christian pacifist but eventually embraced violence in extreme circumstances was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He began as a pacifist Lutheran theologian, but eventually joined the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.
For example, we hold in contempt people who come up with "Christian" excuses for anti-homosexual or anti-minority violence.
Why should any sensible person regard a pacifist who thinks mass-murderers should be given free rein as less obnoxious than a skin-head who advocates beating up Mexican immigrants?
It did, actually. The Romans weren't genocidal, and always welcomed neighbors and allies who didn't war upon them, and even better, accepted Roman suzerainty willingly. Moreover, after the more exploitative phase of the Republic, during the earlier Empire period (known as the Principate: 1st-2nd centuries AD), the constituent city-states (civitas, pl. civitates — the fundamental unit of the Empire) basically ruled their own affairs as autonomous republics.
You can read more about the self-governing Roman civitates here.
By that time we had made our break with the establishment and we were fierce pacifists. We saw no hope that any acceptable future would emerge from the coming war. We had made up our minds that we would at least not be led like sheep to the slaughter as the class of 1915 had been. Our mood was no longer tragic resignation, but anger and contempt for the older generation which had brought us into this mess. We raged against the hypocrisy and stupidity of our elders, just as the young rebels raged in the 1960s in America, and for similar reasons. […]
We looked around us and saw nothing but idiocy. The great British Empire visibly crumbling, and the sooner it fell apart the better so far as we were concerned. Millions of men unemployed, and millions of children growing up undernourished in dilapidated slums. A king mouthing patriotic platitudes which none of us believed. A government which had no answer to any of its problems except to rearm as rapidly as possible. A military establishment which believed in bombing the German civilian economy as the only feasible strategy. A clique of old men in positions of power, blindly repeating the mistakes of 1914, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing in the intervening twenty-four years. A population of middle-aged nonentities, caring only for money and status, to stupid even to flee from the wrath to come.
We looked for one honest man among the political leaders of the world. Chamberlain, our prime minister, we despised as a hypocrite. Hitler was no hypocrite, but he was insane. Nobody had any use for Stalin or Mussolini. Winston Churchill was our archenemy, the man personally responsible for the Gallipoli campaign, in which so many of our six hundred died. He was the incorrigible warmonger, already planning the campaigns in which we were to die. We hated Churchill as our American successors in the 1960s hated Johnson and Nixon. But we were lucky in 1938 to find one man whom we could follow and admire, Mahatma Gandhi. […]
We had grand visions of the redemption of Europe by nonviolence. The goose-stepping soldiers, marching from country to country, meeting no resistance, finding only sullen noncooperation and six-hour lectures. The leaders of the nonviolence being shot, and others coming forward fearlessly to take their places. The goose-stepping soldiers, sickened by the cold-blooded slaughter, one day refusing to carry out the order to shoot. The massive disobedience of the soldiers disrupting the machinery of military occupation. The soldiers, converted to nonviolence, returning to their own country to use on their government the tactics that we had taught them. The final impotence of Hitler confronted with the refusal of his own soldiers to hate their enemies. The collapse of military institutions everywhere, leading to an era of worldwide peace and sanity. […]
[The lack of revolt by Hitler's troops from the cold-blooded slaughter of his concentration camps shows just how likely that dream was of coming true. When war actually began, reality turned out to be quite different from expectations…. –MEM]
So this was the war against which we had raged with the fury of righteous adolescence. It was all very different from what we had expected. Our gas masks, issued to the civilian population before the war began, were gathering dust in closets. Nobody spoke of anthrax bombs anymore. London was being bombed, but our streets were not choked with maimed and fear-crazed refugees. All our talk about the collapse of civilization began to seem a little irrelevant.
Mr. Churchill had now been in power for five months, and he had carried through the socialist reforms which the Labour party had failed to achieve in twenty years. War profiteers were unmercifully taxed, unemployment disappeared, and the children of the slums were for the first time adequately fed. It began to be difficult to despise Mr. Churchill as much as our principles demanded.
Our little band of pacifists was dwindling. […] Those of us who were still faithful continued to grow cabbages and boycott the OTC, but we felt less and less sure of our moral superiority. For me the final stumbling block was the establishment of the Petain-Laval government in France. This was in some sense a pacifist government. It had abandoned violent resistance to Hitler and chosen the path of reconciliation. Many of the Frenchmen who supported Petain were sincere pacifists, sharing my faith in nonviolent resistance to evil. Unfortunately, many were not. The worst of it was that there was no way to distinguish the sincere pacifists from the opportunists and collaborators. Pacifism was destroyed as a moral force as soon as Laval touched it. […]
Those of us who abandoned Gandhi and reenlisted in the OTC did not do so with any enthusiasm. We still did not imagine that a country could fight and win a world war without destroying its soul in the process. If anybody had told us in 1940 that England would survive six years of war against Hitler, achieve most of the political objectives for which the war had been fought, suffer only one third of the casualties we had in World War I, and finally emerge into a world in which our moral and human values were largely intact, we would have said, “No, we do not believe in fairy tales.”
Reference:
Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope, 1984, Harper &Row, New York; pp. 111-113, 115-116.
Judged by modern standards, harsh if not brutal, but then who else in their era, judged by modern standards, was not? At least they recognized that dead men and sacked cities pay no tribute. Corruption -- but again, name a country of their time that did not have it?
Capable of incorporating many civilizations and persons -- an empire at one point ruled by Philip the Arab, with toward the end a largely Germanic army, thinkers such as Seneca the Spaniard, Greek physicians and thinkers, a certain Paul of Tarsus who could claim citizenship, etc..
Si vis pacem para bellum is a universal truth.
--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II.
What I didn't know was whether he had changed his mind, so I asked him if he had, by, say, 1938.
"Of course."
It reads in part: "We do not desire a German 'victory;' we would not lift a finger to help either Britain or Germany to 'win'; but there would be a profound justice, I feel, however terrible, in a German victory (In actuality, any ruler would find us rather awkward customers, one no less than another.)"
He also cites Alex Comfort:
"What again does Mr. Orwell imagine the role of the artist should be in occupied territory? He should protest with all his force, where and when he can, against such evils as he sees - but can he do this more usefull by temporarily accepting the status quo, or by skirmishing in Epping Forest with a pocket-full of hand grenades? I think that English writers honour, and will follow when the opportunity comes, the example of integrity that Gide has set."
There's much more in the same vein in that book.
Eventually I read this, and it rang true:
The Gandhi Nobody Knows
Part of the reason, I guess, is that they hold the military in such low regard that they can't think of how a force such as Imperial Japan or in today's world Iran can have a worse military.
The liberals love to cry and point "look, my-lay, evil American army" or "look, just because muslim terrorists were using a hospital as a base the evil Americans bombed it".
They are too ill-informed to know, or too dishonest to admit, that for many armies those things are seen as signs of weakness.
The "Pumpkin Gag" MAY be amusing to the Intelligence Section (S-2) clerks at a higher (and safer) Hdqtrs., but the grunt in the field is living at the edge of the world in human existence. Surviving firefights and being comfortable in between is about as far as a combat soldier, of either side, is apt to ponder.
The only value of Handey's comedy is to be added to the list of that which should be ignored.
What makes you think that the army of Imperial Japan was not "full of good, decent hard-working people"? From everything I know, it was. The fact that it committed horrible atrocities, such as the Rape of Nanking, was due to the ideology of the officer corps, one that held weakness, surrender, and civilians in contempt, combined with the disillusionment with China's leading role in civilization, together with ordinary soldiers who were especially compliant since they came mostly from the lower classes of a society still emerging from feudalism. The soldiers who committed such horrible atrocities were not thugs and murderers. They were mostly farmboys, who, if you met them at home, would be just as nice and decent as their counterparts from Kansas.
Hillary is a Trinity University student who, like a number of young "rakes", joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Auxiliary while a student in the late 1930's. Hillary is a "Citizen of the World" and is above religion and politics and only joined the RAFVA to be a member of the "Best Flying Club in the World".
The book is first person narrative and contemporary to the times. The pertinent chapter to the drift of this thread is chapter four, "The World of Peter Pease", where Hillary and another educated pilot, Peter Pease get into an "intellectual" discussion regarding war, politics, and Christianity.
It's a small book, but an interesting read. Hillary and Pease, as well as all the pilots who participated in the Battle of Britain are those most deserving of the sentiments expressed in the lyrics from the song: "The Impossible Dream".
I suppose the point is not whether you met them as they were at home, but if you were defenseless civilians or prisoners.
They were nice guys, but they just liked to bayonet prisoners to keep their skills up. And send pix home to mama who, afaik, didn't object.
Of course WWII showed that the enemy, the National Socialists, or the Japanese Imperialists, or the Soviet Communists, would indeed murder people by the millions.
A.A. Milne is most famous for writing the first "Winnie the Pooh" stories for his son, Christopher Robin Milne.
Must go look this person up to see what qualified him to be Secretary of the Navy, a position Senator Webb, a Naval Academy grad, filled before him. One of my big concerns about Obama is uncertainty about the types he would appoint to key positions, especially those related to foreign policy and national security. I have much lesser concern about his possible domestic appointments.
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