Pacifism to me has always seemed like a bankrupt ideology in every form that one would reasonably consider "pacifism".
When the right to self-determination is essentially enforced by a race to the bottom of arms, any position of absolute non-violence is close to worthless. There's a line of thinking these days that the modern protest has become largely ineffective because governments understand them now - if a demonstration is peaceful, then the people who show up to it are going to stand around and then go home and continue not threatening their position at the top in any serious manner.
This seems like an interesting idea. Non-violent protests only really work if the other side over-reacts and you get some good media coverage out of it. If you just ignore the protesters, they turn out to be largely ineffective. Which leads back to having to do something violent to get media attention.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Pacifism to me has always seemed like a bankrupt ideology in every form that one would reasonably consider "pacifism".
When the right to self-determination is essentially enforced by a race to the bottom of arms, any position of absolute non-violence is close to worthless. There's a line of thinking these days that the modern protest has become largely ineffective because governments understand them now - if a demonstration is peaceful, then the people who show up to it are going to stand around and then go home and continue not threatening their position at the top in any serious manner.
This seems like an interesting idea. Non-violent protests only really work if the other side over-reacts and you get some good media coverage out of it. If you just ignore the protesters, they turn out to be largely ineffective. Which leads back to having to do something violent to get media attention.
I read an article which suggested that the essential problem is, during the 60's and such, no one had ever really seen protests on that scale or counter-cultural changes surrounding them. No one in government knew that the protesters would just go home after they were done - 60,000 people showed up somewhere and they looked at those numbers and wondered what would happen if they didn't appease them somehow.
It's not so much that violence is a necessity, as it is that you need to be able to threaten to do something if the protest is not heeded. For western democracies this usually isn't violence - civil disobedience and the like would probably be more effective, more sustainable and far more damaging to the right people.
The problem today is that you can rightly assume that the protesters will just go home and feel happy they did something after.
usually protests and marches are used to gain visibility and that's about it, these days. for example, there was a march involving the Tamil Tigers here in Ottawa, or something, and they blocked off large portions of downtown with their hundreds of marching people, crippling both public and private transportation and forcing people to at least look at them. there was of course news coverage, but there was also my irritation fueling my curiosity and google searches about the issue etc.
"Lethal" vs "nonlethal" isn't a clear binary distinction - it's really "lethal" vs. "less lethal" with an eye to a particular situation. On an older target, a taser is going to be more dangerous than trying to wrestle them to the ground. On a younger target, it's going to be less dangerous.
Anyway, pacificism is silly. It's morally acceptable to use violence when there is strong evidence that doing so would prevent worse violence. It's a very simple utilitarian calculus.
It's only complicated because there are a lot of situations in which the risk and benefits of using violence have to be assessed rapidly with very limited information. But that doesn't mean the basic moral principle is complicated - it only means that the risk is difficult to assess. With that in mind, it's typically better to err on the side of less violence, but that's not the same as a total adherence to pacifism.
There's more than one flavour of pacifism.
I've called myself a pacifist for a long time. I do accept that violence is sometimes necessary to survive. But I'm deeply skeptical of its effectiveness and utility, and think that short-term thinking, nationalism and ethnocentrism obscure many of the damaging effects of supposedly effective violence in history.
So, I'm performing the same 'utilitarian calculus' you are, but with different enough conclusions that I end up with 'There're really really hardly any situations where using violence is preferable to a non-violent solution.'
usually protests and marches are used to gain visibility and that's about it, these days. for example, there was a march involving the Tamil Tigers here in Ottawa, or something, and they blocked off large portions of downtown with their hundreds of marching people, crippling both public and private transportation and forcing people to at least look at them. there was of course news coverage, but there was also my irritation fueling my curiosity and google searches about the issue etc.
That was in Toronto and it just pissed everyone off. They shut down the major highway to downtown.
Yeah, but without control or skill, I would be better off retreating than fighting; otherwise, I would wind up in jail for manslaughter.
I meant in a more general sense, but that's a decent enough example. If you weren't able to retreat from someone trying to kill you, violence would be the better option.
Looking toward the goal of survival with me being as maimed or injured as little as possible,
I don't know how solid my opponent is, she could be pure muscle or have bear armor layers of fat as it was called in an Oblivion thread. I also don't know how tired she is, what other weapons or accomplices there are. In terms of a break in or mugging, I have to strike fast, trip the tiger chasing me, and get secure. Nothing else matters but me and the people close to me. Going for a killing shot takes time away from my survival.
Again, pragmatism.
After all is said and done, I might help the poor SOB or DOB out on their parole hearing and maybe help them find work, but in the heat of the moment, its get out and get secure.
You've never seen horror movies? People get axe murdered because they never finish the job after throwing the bad guy down the stairs. Though more seriously, it can get you killed. Of course the opposite can too, so you have to make a judgment based on the specifics on the situation.
There's definitely situations where it is safer to finish them off. If you have them in a rear naked choke, for instance, if you can KO them, there's no reason to let go before they are dead short of legal ones.
I meant in a more general sense, but that's a decent enough example. If you weren't able to retreat from someone trying to kill you, violence would be the better option.
What about violence against someone who can easily kill you (holding you at gunpoint), but just wants to rob you?
Is it better to almost certainly end up dead in order to go out fighting, or should you just give him what he wants and hope he won't kill you?
I would say the latter.
My policy on being mugged is to cooperate to the full extent while preparing to attack if necessary. There are plenty of situations where cooperation or at least delaying an attack can significantly improve your chances of survival. It depends.
Now, in situations where you believe you are more likely than not to die either way, you might as well try to take them with you.
From this blog post at the Seton Hill University site.
edit again: Adding some context for those who don't wanna read a big ol thing without knowing what it is. It's an excerpt from an essay about pacifist resistance in the Holocaust, focusing largely on the resistance in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a French village which saved around 5000 Jews, peacefully. There's a book, that I can't remember the title of, about that town which is quite fascinating.
...
Another important example of this combination of principled and pragmatic pacifism during the Holocaust occurred in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. In this mostly Huguenot town, an absolute-pacifist pastor influenced his congregation, normally just-war Calvinists, to mount one of the most dramatic and effective resistance and rescue operations during World War II. How did this town of five thousand Christians manage to rescue five thousand Jews? The response included a spectrum of characteristics, in addition to the pacifist pastor. There was the tough daily pragmatism and long-term organizational skill of the pastor's wife, Magda. There endured in Le Chambon the memory of a history of persecution of Huguenot ancestors at the hands of the 17th century French church and state. The department of Haute Loire also had a large infrastructure of resistance, with both violent and nonviolent groups operating in the region.
Additionally, a "good German," the sympathetic Nazi Colonel Julius Schmalling, may have contributed to the Chambonais? rescue efforts. A veteran of World War I and gymnasium teacher of history and literature between the wars, Schmalling commanded the German troops occupying the Haute-Loire region. Schmalling was credited by citizens of several villages with effectively mitigating Gestapo atrocities in the area under his influence, including protecting the Jews of Le Chambon and nearby Le Puy (Hallie 60-83).
Le Chambon became a hospital town for recovering soldiers who may have been relieved to be at least temporarily out of the fray. As they convalesced, they intentionally or unintentionally became less vigilant about Jewish refugees in and around town. A similar pattern emerged in Assisi, Italy, where Rev. Ruffino Nicacci coordinated rescue and "underground railroad? activities on behalf of Jews while wounded German servicemen recovered there during the German occupation (Silver 94-99). At least one pacifist group has an impressive record in resistance work during the Holocaust. The American Friends Service Committee, the activist arm of the Quakers, worked in the United States and in Europe to rescue Jews, especially children. They worked on legislation at home and in camps in Europe, collaborating with Jewish groups on both fronts. Their record is impressive, even if, to use the title of David Wyman's book on the refugee crisis from 1938 to 1941, they ran up against "paper walls? restricting their opportunities for movement (164-5). Yet they persisted and mined their diplomatic contacts to create networks that provided the "paper weapons??identity and transit documents?that could mean the difference between life and death for Jews in occupied Europe during World War II.
These Quakers acted as a group, as pacifists and as Christians, while networking with anyone who could help them save lives?even Nazis. Quakers had worked in defeated Germany after the end of the First World War, assisting refugees, the displaced, and the poor. They also served in refugee and prison camp during the Second World War. These missions won them the loyalty and respect of the German people, and even Hitler was forced to tolerate their presence in areas under control of the Reich. Their involvement with the defeated enemy after World War I incarnates the poorly understood and controversial notion of forgiveness. Pacifist activism fulfills the commandment to love one's enemies, and, as this example suggests, it is a virtue not without strategic benefits.
We must place the pacifism of Le Chambon, Assisi, and the Quakers in the context of Christian response to the Holocaust overall: less than one percent of the Christians in Nazi-occupied Europe were involved in resistance and rescue. We also must assert that the pacifist resources they drew on should have been much more a part of the stock-in-trade of all Christians throughout Europe. It has been well documented that Christians were conditioned by centuries of anti-Judaism to accept Nazi antisemitism. It must also be stated that Christians had been conditioned by centuries of acceptance of war to ignore the pacifism on which their faith was founded. By not asking the systematic questions raised by pacifism, we allow rescue and resistance stories to be seen as anomalous events based on the charism of individuals. This inaccuracy marginalizes the radical nature of a community's achievement, obscuring the conceptual and organizational bases of their heroism.
Critics of pacifism have made much of the difference between the brutality of the Nazis and the irregularly lethal force of opponents such as those Gandhi faced in Imperial Britain or Martin Luther King, Jr., was up against with Jim Crow sheriffs. While the Third Reich was systematic in their reprisals for violent resistance, their record of response to nonviolent resistance is less consistent. Organized resistance and rescue may have disabled or mitigated the brutality of occupying troops. In the "Nordic? countries, assumptions about racial common ground may have tempered the response of occupying German troops. The Danes were able to rescue almost their entire Jewish population in 1943. The Norwegians, from 1940 to 1943, were led by their schoolteachers in a mass movement of non-cooperation that disabled the puppet Quisling government (Jameson and Sharp). Even beyond Scandinavia, there are examples: Italian Axis troops stationed in southern France found ways to fully or partially disobey deportation and arrest orders against Jews. There are even a few stories of "good Germans" like Julius Schmalling in the Le Chambon saga.
...
edit: spoilered for bigness.
You know who saved more Jews than all the pacifists in Europe?
these guys
plus theses guys
fun fact: in order to end WWII we(aka everyone who isn't a Nazi, but mostly the Soviets) had to kill 5,533,000 German soldiers.
From this blog post at the Seton Hill University site.
edit again: Adding some context for those who don't wanna read a big ol thing without knowing what it is. It's an excerpt from an essay about pacifist resistance in the Holocaust, focusing largely on the resistance in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a French village which saved around 5000 Jews, peacefully. There's a book, that I can't remember the title of, about that town which is quite fascinating.
...
Another important example of this combination of principled and pragmatic pacifism during the Holocaust occurred in the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. In this mostly Huguenot town, an absolute-pacifist pastor influenced his congregation, normally just-war Calvinists, to mount one of the most dramatic and effective resistance and rescue operations during World War II. How did this town of five thousand Christians manage to rescue five thousand Jews? The response included a spectrum of characteristics, in addition to the pacifist pastor. There was the tough daily pragmatism and long-term organizational skill of the pastor's wife, Magda. There endured in Le Chambon the memory of a history of persecution of Huguenot ancestors at the hands of the 17th century French church and state. The department of Haute Loire also had a large infrastructure of resistance, with both violent and nonviolent groups operating in the region.
Additionally, a "good German," the sympathetic Nazi Colonel Julius Schmalling, may have contributed to the Chambonais? rescue efforts. A veteran of World War I and gymnasium teacher of history and literature between the wars, Schmalling commanded the German troops occupying the Haute-Loire region. Schmalling was credited by citizens of several villages with effectively mitigating Gestapo atrocities in the area under his influence, including protecting the Jews of Le Chambon and nearby Le Puy (Hallie 60-83).
Le Chambon became a hospital town for recovering soldiers who may have been relieved to be at least temporarily out of the fray. As they convalesced, they intentionally or unintentionally became less vigilant about Jewish refugees in and around town. A similar pattern emerged in Assisi, Italy, where Rev. Ruffino Nicacci coordinated rescue and "underground railroad? activities on behalf of Jews while wounded German servicemen recovered there during the German occupation (Silver 94-99). At least one pacifist group has an impressive record in resistance work during the Holocaust. The American Friends Service Committee, the activist arm of the Quakers, worked in the United States and in Europe to rescue Jews, especially children. They worked on legislation at home and in camps in Europe, collaborating with Jewish groups on both fronts. Their record is impressive, even if, to use the title of David Wyman's book on the refugee crisis from 1938 to 1941, they ran up against "paper walls? restricting their opportunities for movement (164-5). Yet they persisted and mined their diplomatic contacts to create networks that provided the "paper weapons??identity and transit documents?that could mean the difference between life and death for Jews in occupied Europe during World War II.
These Quakers acted as a group, as pacifists and as Christians, while networking with anyone who could help them save lives?even Nazis. Quakers had worked in defeated Germany after the end of the First World War, assisting refugees, the displaced, and the poor. They also served in refugee and prison camp during the Second World War. These missions won them the loyalty and respect of the German people, and even Hitler was forced to tolerate their presence in areas under control of the Reich. Their involvement with the defeated enemy after World War I incarnates the poorly understood and controversial notion of forgiveness. Pacifist activism fulfills the commandment to love one's enemies, and, as this example suggests, it is a virtue not without strategic benefits.
We must place the pacifism of Le Chambon, Assisi, and the Quakers in the context of Christian response to the Holocaust overall: less than one percent of the Christians in Nazi-occupied Europe were involved in resistance and rescue. We also must assert that the pacifist resources they drew on should have been much more a part of the stock-in-trade of all Christians throughout Europe. It has been well documented that Christians were conditioned by centuries of anti-Judaism to accept Nazi antisemitism. It must also be stated that Christians had been conditioned by centuries of acceptance of war to ignore the pacifism on which their faith was founded. By not asking the systematic questions raised by pacifism, we allow rescue and resistance stories to be seen as anomalous events based on the charism of individuals. This inaccuracy marginalizes the radical nature of a community's achievement, obscuring the conceptual and organizational bases of their heroism.
Critics of pacifism have made much of the difference between the brutality of the Nazis and the irregularly lethal force of opponents such as those Gandhi faced in Imperial Britain or Martin Luther King, Jr., was up against with Jim Crow sheriffs. While the Third Reich was systematic in their reprisals for violent resistance, their record of response to nonviolent resistance is less consistent. Organized resistance and rescue may have disabled or mitigated the brutality of occupying troops. In the "Nordic? countries, assumptions about racial common ground may have tempered the response of occupying German troops. The Danes were able to rescue almost their entire Jewish population in 1943. The Norwegians, from 1940 to 1943, were led by their schoolteachers in a mass movement of non-cooperation that disabled the puppet Quisling government (Jameson and Sharp). Even beyond Scandinavia, there are examples: Italian Axis troops stationed in southern France found ways to fully or partially disobey deportation and arrest orders against Jews. There are even a few stories of "good Germans" like Julius Schmalling in the Le Chambon saga.
...
edit: spoilered for bigness.
You know who saved more Jews than all the pacifists in Europe?
these guys
plus theses guys
fun fact: in order to end WWII we(aka everyone who isn't a Nazi, but mostly the Soviets) had to kill 5,533,000 German soldiers.
You know who saved a lot of jews, without killing anyone
edit: and the 5,533,000 was only to end the fighting in Europe. japan required at least another 2,000,000 deaths to end the fighting in the pacific so your final number is over 7.5 or 8 million.
fun fact: in order to end WWII we(aka everyone who isn't a Nazi, but mostly the Soviets) had to kill 5,533,000 German soldiers.
You know who saved a lot of jews, without killing anyone
(pics snipped)
edit: and the 5,533,000 was only to end the fighting in Europe. japan required at least another 2,000,000 deaths to end the fighting in the pacific so your final number is over 7.5 or 8 million.
Their pacifism only succeeded because of the violence of others. There's no indication the plague that was Nazism and Imperial Japan wouldn't have continued to spread, in fact the opposite is the only reasonable conclusion.
WW2 is the poster child for the morally justified and necessary use of violence. The Axis was so vilely evil that if you ever design a fictional villain as evil as they were, said villain will come off as one dimensional and unrealistic.
To give an example, in the Dexter book series, one main villain chopped the arms and legs of a person while keeping them alive, and people said that was more silly than evil. Except the Japanese actually did that, and then used the limbless victim to test weapons. They did vivisection without anesthesia on children as well, and the worst part of all is this wasn't for some ultimately misguided purpose, but simply to advance a genocidal WMD program.
I'd argue that once a person or organization gets to that level of evil, a peaceful resolution is actually morally wrong, even if it could work. Someone who does something like that is anathema, and every breath they draw is an affront to everything that was, is, or will ever be good or decent.
World War 2 can't really be used as a discussion on pacifism because it was forced on people and the choice was fight or die. Additionally, the onset of World War 1 due to the violence of one individual who chose violent means to make his point heard created the conditions for the National Socialist German Workers party to rise to power.
Pacifism would surely be defined by it's response to a "fight or die" choice?
If one were to choose to fight, one wouldn't be a pacifist.
And for the majority of people, the choice wasn't "fight or die". Its not like the Nazi's went around killing every Frenchmen they saw, or would have killed every Briton. For most participants the choice was "fight or allow the Nazi's to run your country".
World War 2 can't really be used as a discussion on pacifism because it was forced on people and the choice was fight or die.
Proving pacifism is ineffective when it really matters.
Additionally, the onset of World War 1 due to the violence of one individual who chose violent means to make his point heard created the conditions for the National Socialist German Workers party to rise to power.
This does make the point that we'd be better off if everyone acted ethically all the time, which seems self-evident, but regardless of if a problem was caused by violence in the first place, some of the time the best way to solve it is further violence.
Us killing millions of Axis turned out amazingly well for the world in the long term, including for the nations who were the principal recipients of said violence.
Posts
This seems like an interesting idea. Non-violent protests only really work if the other side over-reacts and you get some good media coverage out of it. If you just ignore the protesters, they turn out to be largely ineffective. Which leads back to having to do something violent to get media attention.
I read an article which suggested that the essential problem is, during the 60's and such, no one had ever really seen protests on that scale or counter-cultural changes surrounding them. No one in government knew that the protesters would just go home after they were done - 60,000 people showed up somewhere and they looked at those numbers and wondered what would happen if they didn't appease them somehow.
It's not so much that violence is a necessity, as it is that you need to be able to threaten to do something if the protest is not heeded. For western democracies this usually isn't violence - civil disobedience and the like would probably be more effective, more sustainable and far more damaging to the right people.
The problem today is that you can rightly assume that the protesters will just go home and feel happy they did something after.
Hey, me too.
That was in Toronto and it just pissed everyone off. They shut down the major highway to downtown.
Let me tell you, they gained no sympathy.
You've never seen horror movies? People get axe murdered because they never finish the job after throwing the bad guy down the stairs. Though more seriously, it can get you killed. Of course the opposite can too, so you have to make a judgment based on the specifics on the situation.
There's definitely situations where it is safer to finish them off. If you have them in a rear naked choke, for instance, if you can KO them, there's no reason to let go before they are dead short of legal ones.
My policy on being mugged is to cooperate to the full extent while preparing to attack if necessary. There are plenty of situations where cooperation or at least delaying an attack can significantly improve your chances of survival. It depends.
Now, in situations where you believe you are more likely than not to die either way, you might as well try to take them with you.
You know who saved more Jews than all the pacifists in Europe?
these guys
fun fact: in order to end WWII we(aka everyone who isn't a Nazi, but mostly the Soviets) had to kill 5,533,000 German soldiers.
You know who saved a lot of jews, without killing anyone
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1165327536712&pagename=Zone-English-Euro_Muslims/EMELayout
edit: and the 5,533,000 was only to end the fighting in Europe. japan required at least another 2,000,000 deaths to end the fighting in the pacific so your final number is over 7.5 or 8 million.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Their pacifism only succeeded because of the violence of others. There's no indication the plague that was Nazism and Imperial Japan wouldn't have continued to spread, in fact the opposite is the only reasonable conclusion.
WW2 is the poster child for the morally justified and necessary use of violence. The Axis was so vilely evil that if you ever design a fictional villain as evil as they were, said villain will come off as one dimensional and unrealistic.
To give an example, in the Dexter book series, one main villain chopped the arms and legs of a person while keeping them alive, and people said that was more silly than evil. Except the Japanese actually did that, and then used the limbless victim to test weapons. They did vivisection without anesthesia on children as well, and the worst part of all is this wasn't for some ultimately misguided purpose, but simply to advance a genocidal WMD program.
I'd argue that once a person or organization gets to that level of evil, a peaceful resolution is actually morally wrong, even if it could work. Someone who does something like that is anathema, and every breath they draw is an affront to everything that was, is, or will ever be good or decent.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
If one were to choose to fight, one wouldn't be a pacifist.
And for the majority of people, the choice wasn't "fight or die". Its not like the Nazi's went around killing every Frenchmen they saw, or would have killed every Briton. For most participants the choice was "fight or allow the Nazi's to run your country".
Proving pacifism is ineffective when it really matters.
This does make the point that we'd be better off if everyone acted ethically all the time, which seems self-evident, but regardless of if a problem was caused by violence in the first place, some of the time the best way to solve it is further violence.
Us killing millions of Axis turned out amazingly well for the world in the long term, including for the nations who were the principal recipients of said violence.