Guenter Lewy: Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988.
This book should have been written by a pacifist. That it was not, that many pacifists will indignantly say American or its ‘military-industrial complex’ suffers the real “moral crisis,” confirms Guenter Lewy’s thesis: The major American pacifist organizations have become politicized. That is, they tend to put justice, (mis)conceived as egalitarianism, ahead of nonviolence and reconciliation. In their own way, key pacifist organizers now agree with political conservatives who insist that justice must precede genuine peace—although of course the two sides define ‘justice’ quite differently. Today’s pacifists not only define justice as partisan socialists do (and indeed may earlier pacifists were socialists) but they go on to define the conditions of justice as Marxist socialists do, accepting revolutionary war as the inevitable precursor of social justice, itself said to be the necessary precursor of peace.
Lewy examines the four major pacifist organizations in the United States: the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the War Resisters League—all founded during or in the aftermath of the First World War. In the 1930s, at the very height of the Popular Front coalition of the ‘Left’ against fascism, these organizations rejected collaboration with communists; as Dorothy Detzer of WILPF said in 1937, communists lacked a “basis of moral integrity,” making honest partnership impossible. Pacifists had learned this not by theorizing but by experience. communists wanted to use pacifists for decidedly un-pacific ends. Some fifteen years before Senator Joseph McCarthy undertook to instruct Americans on the evils of communism, and only ten years before the Democratic Party split over the issue, pacifists well understood the Machiavellian arts of the Communist Party, and conscientiously resisted them.
But by the 1960s pacifist sentiments on collaboration began to change. Although Soviet power had increased in the previous three decades, and Soviet tactics in international politics remained unchanged, Stalin himself was gone. A new generation of pacifist organizers associated anti-communism less with a principled response to the nature of communism itself and more with America’s ‘McCarthyite’ reaction to it, a reaction portrayed as part paranoiac, part unscrupulous. United States participation in the Vietnam War stirred fear and anger sufficient to distort perceptions of the American regime itself. Increasingly, the American ‘Left,’ including pacifists, believed America to be the focus of evil in the modern world.
None of these factors logically need entail the abandonment of nonviolence. Judging from Lewy’s evidence, however, pacifists began to endorse a distorted Gandhianism. Gandhi had taught that the moral superiority of courage, even the battlefield courage that kills, to cowardly submission. American pacifists injected a dose of moral relativism and subjectivism to this, claiming that Vietnamese communists and other leftists revolutionaries had the right to resist injustice violently so long as they “believe in violence,” in the words of one organizer. The Gandhian moral hierarchy collapsed, and soon violent means were said to justify revolutionary ends. While Gandhi himself had collaborated with communists from a position of moral and political strength, American pacifists went adrift. What Liberation editor David Dellinger called “the violence of the victims” won sympathy from persons who in effect began to advocate pacifism for the democracies (“so-called,” many organizers insisted) and revolutionary war for communists (often described, wishfully, as agrarian nationalists).
In order to retain a pacifist shape to their activities, organizers redefined violence. ‘Revolutionary’ violence, a mere reaction to oppression, they described as “qualitatively different” from “the violence of the status quo”—which might not be literally violent at all, but rather was a synonym for injustice defined as socio-economic equality.
As Lewy acknowledges, traditionally pacifists have no simply condemned wars but have distinguished lesser evils from greater. He does not fully acknowledge how far back this tradition extends. Such early Church Fathers as Origen prayed for the victory of Roman armies, while forbidding warfare by Christians. The criteria for deciding which army to pray for, were supplied by the classical jus war doctrine, not yet ‘baptized’ by Augustine.
The moral crisis of American pacifism might better be restated as follows. After the just war doctrine was integrated into Christianity by Catholic and Protestant theologians, pacifist Christians got into the habit of refuting that doctrine in an unqualified way. By the twentieth century, many began almost ritually to condemn both sides in any war. Since the early nineteenth century, pacifists have become more politically active; prayerful martyrdom gave way to partisan organizing. The successes of Gandhi in South Africa and India whetted these political ambitions. And thanks to ‘totalitarian’ tyranny, political life itself became more ‘religious,’ if in a blasphemous way. Thus pacifists’ need for a prudential means of evaluating political actions radically increased, even as they abandoned traditional philosophic and moral guidance. In particular, they abandoned the right-to-revolution criteria set down in the Declaration of Independence, criteria firmly based upon God-endowed natural rights.
Political life being what it is, this vacuum had to be filled. Pacifists eventually seized upon the ‘soft’ Marxism of the ‘Sixties New Left, then the harder Marxism of ‘liberation theology,’ to provide the needed criteria of judgment. Lewy is not alone in regarding this as an impoverishment of pacifism—politically, intellectually, and spiritually.
Lewy claims that “when the pacifist’s conscience does not allow him to support policies that utilize force or the threat of force, the proper course for him is to remain silent.” This recommendation strikes me as more utopian than much of what pacifists say, and moreover wrong. Pacifists should remain faithful to their witness, in public. Christians in particular are not know for silence but for courageous speech.
The real questions for pacifists are: Have their organizations remained faithful to the pacifist witness” Does some form of Marxism really offer the best criteria for judging the wars pacifists may not engage in, but must nonetheless judge? Finally, are there pacifists with the moral and civic courage not merely to raise these issues, and to engage in quiet, intra-organization debate, but to form a new organization altogether? A pacifist organization sensitive to the principles of God-endowed natural rights underlying the United States Constitution, the document that gives pacifists the political protections enjoyed in no Marxist regime anywhere, might in time have a better effect here and abroad than any other. A distinctively American pacifism is the only truly Gandhian response to Gandhi, who always insisted that each individual and nation work toward peace within its own tradition.
In that even, some day this book may yet be written by a pacifist.
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