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.
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.
jorjor well
Most countries aren’t fascist enough to require anti fascist violence
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.
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.
What are your thoughts on people who are against pacifism?
It’s an elaborate and well-organized psyop by fascists/the very wealthy to bait people to the left of the far-right into promoting violent action, thus successfully smearing their cause/ideology/person as being both violent and extremist, and making it easy for the fascists in power to label, monitor, silence, jail, and/or kill them. AI is being used to facilitate this.
It seems too easy to me to make such a clear narrative. And one could argue the same about pacifists being a psyop. The media broadly prefers pacifists, as do most educational establishments. I think there is truth to what you are saying, that often people in groups are pushed to violent action by provocateurs. This justifies crackdowns and surveillance, as well as to smear them. However peaceful actions do tend to lack any ability to effect change against a rigid structure, especially one willing to use violence even against those who do not.
The ideal for those who want to control is to have small groups commit reprehensible acts on relatively small scales and on targets that seem almost unrelated to their cause, just general terrorism, while the mainstream versions of those movements condemn any violence at all, and can easily be ignored or squashed when they get too large.
Successful change against repression of any kind has always involved a threat to the power base, or the power itself. Even nonviolent action against structures that give power generally need to be defended from violent repressiion, resulting in the end with violence from both sides. Strikes were met with crackdowns which had to be met with resistance to be taken seriously. The stonewall riots helped show that a repressed community would not simply lay down forever.
Yes, calls to violence should be met with suspicion, but pacifism is the absolute rejection of violence, and the romance of such a pure position is a tool of oppression used when it is useful to do so. Those who wish to do good will often search for ways to do good without compromising on their other values, while those who wish simply to control will do whatever best maintains control.
This does not mean that we should simply do the most expedient thing to gain power and allow the good to come later, but that we must be realistic when examining our options and not let our values cause us to lose. On the other hand, our values lend us our strength by being our point to rally on. When what we want is a good for all we will have more support than opposition, and without that we cannot win and any victory would be hollow.
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.
Nonsense, who was against Gandhi MLK Mandela? At the same time, MLK never undercut Malcom X, the pacifist and the warrior can work together, they each have their role.
