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…
jorjor well
Most countries aren’t fascist enough to require anti fascist violence
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.
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.
Ulterior motives, awful people, something to that effect. I am personally not pacifist, but if someone wants to be pacifist, I understand.
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.
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.
Even insects wage war amongst themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_ants
If something with a brain made of a handful of cells wages war, well…
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.
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
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.
Get rid of capitalism
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.
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.
pacifism <> anti-militarist <> non-violence
However depending on how you define those, you may recognize in each one. If we rely on a legal definition, militarism and war are only link to states. Armed force without state are not an army, and armed conflicts no declared by states are not war. Dumb lex, sed lex
For exemple, in this definition revolution is not a war, so pacifist could took part in armed force independent from states. That explain why their is a pacifist tradition in communism … except when those revolution succeed … well you should leave that armed force that became an army and refuse conscription.
This debate occurred recently through the essay “How Nonviolence Protects the State”, which address the non-violence and/or pacifism as exploiters : if you don’t want to use violence, other will have to The essay do not get rid of the ideal of non-violence, only what individual position do to people that could not choose.
Now their is an Elephant in the room : police. A violent armed force, acting for a state but without a declaration of war. So from our first definition, we could be a pacifist and let the cops do the exact same thing that an army.
I don’t think violence is a good way to solve problems is why I’m a pacifist. I do believe that people have a right to self defense, and using violence to coerce is morally wrong.
That is a dilemma, then you’ve got ends and means to contend with and the question of intervention.
