I want peace, and surrender is not peace.
… para bellum. Concept old as shit.
Look, as a programmer I’m lazy. And I’ve worked a lot of extra hours due to that laziness, to automate stuff and have less work to do in the future.
It’s the same with pacifism. If you want peace, sometimes you have first to use extreme violence to eradicate the bastards that don’t.
First murder all fascists, billionaires, and similar threats to peace. And educate the young so they won’t become threats to peace again.
Then we can have peace.
No neutral on a moving train.
I think they waste their time. At this point, signing waivers and petitions don’t matter. Unfortunately until there’s bloodshed things won’t change. Politicians have zero accountability, you vote and it really doesn’t matter, it’s the illusion of having a choice.
You want at least a stick large enough to hit back or scare away aggressors. I agree that a no war world would be best, but that can be achieved by mutual disarment, not by one sided pacifism.
And if just one side refuses to disarm (which is perfectly sound decision seeing how superpowers act) nobody can disarm.
Exactly, the North Korea strategy.
In other words, if one doesn’t have power, they aren’t a pacifist, just weak.
Only once they have the ability to decimate the enemy, do they get to claim that they didn’t use said ability.
You can’t oversimplify the world in to “our side” and “their side,” and say “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” There are countless different sides and there are factions within those sides that have different motivations and agendas. That’s simply a fact, and to pretend otherwise is just lazy.
Pacifists are generally more correct than most people because they’ve figured out the “no war” part of “no war but class war,” and the vast majority of war is not class war (or is perpetrated by the ruling class). I’m not a pacifist but I have respect for those who are.
To be fair, Orwell’s argument is understandable in the specific context of WWII, but it is not a generalizable principle.
Technically, when it comes to violence, it is that simple. There is the side attacking you…and you.
When it comes to fascism, it’s also that simple. You are either “with them” or you are on their list of eventual targets. Unless you do something to stop them, it’s really just a matter of time before they get around to attacking you too.
Technically, when it comes to violence, it is that simple. There is the side attacking you…and you.
No, it isn’t. Even in the purest, simplest scenario of like, crazy guy on the street comes after me for no reason, it still isn’t that simple, because it’s not a zero sum game of his interests vs my own. For him to assault me goes against his own interests, it’s likely that he’ll face legal or social consequences for doing so. At the same time, those legal/social forces are not necessarily “my side,” they might act to protect my wellbeing (or at least punish someone after the fact), but I don’t control them, and they may act against my wishes. For example, I might prefer that my assailant get rehabilitated rather than incarcerated.
This isn’t even an abstract thing for me. I have a relative who used to be very mentally unstable, suffering from paranoid delusions, caused or made worse by the meth he was on, and the war he had fought in. He was a danger to myself and my family, and to everyone in the area. For him to get clean and find treatment that worked for him was in everyone’s interest.
This is in the most extreme example of assailant and victim, and no one else. If you try to scale things up to a nation and pretend that there are only two sides, it’s utterly ridiculous.
“My” side might forcibly conscript me to be sent into some pointless meat grinder, killing people who are in the exact same boat but who happened to be born in a different country. Are they not aggressing against me by doing that? Perhaps the real “sides” are the working people of both countries against the rulers sending us to die.
I think you’re adding context that wouldn’t exist in a real world situation.
If a crazy guy attacks you on the street, would you just stand there and let him kill you because of all those societal consequences that are working against him? If you just stand there and let him kill you, do those things go away?
Because unless you defending yourself is somehow the reason all those things happen to him, then none of those.things should have any impact on your choice to either live or die. Your choice is still binary.
I get what you’re saying about trying to do something preventative to stop the violence from occurring, and that is a valid point. But it also completely ignores the violence itself. When you are faced with an imminent threat to your physical safety, that you can’t run from…doing nothing is the worst thing you can do.
If your relative decided to actually do something to you or your family…would you have just stood there watching as he hurt them? Would you have just let him hurt you, all because rehab was a possible option?
That’s the most extreme example of one-on-one violence. Them, or the ones you love. Them, or you.
As for fascists…even scaled up to the level of a country, it’s the same choice. When the Nazis invaded a country, everyone living there was in one of two possible positions…you were either standing there watching your neighbors get rounded up, or you were the one getting rounded up.
If someone asks you to fight back to save yourself and your neighbors…no…they aren’t the ones doing you harm. The invading force that’s threatening your life, and the lives of those around you, is. You can either stand there and watch it happen, hoping it doesn’t happen to you…or you can try to stop them before it does.
That’s the threat of fascism.
George Orwell risked his life to travel to a different country and fight alongside the anarcho-communists there. I’m gonna agree with George on this one, he’s got the street cred to back it up.
Refusing to defend yourself is a matter of choice and I have no moral issue with you taking an ass kicking without fighting back if you so choose. Refusing to defend innocents when you are capable, though, is morally reprehensible and makes you as culpable as the one attacking them. While you’re taking your ass kicking, pacifists, I’ll be there doing what I can to prevent it from happening and making your attacker regret it.
There are many definitions of pacifism, and without further context to simply say someone is a pacifist automatically makes them a fascist is a pretty myopic point of view.
I am anti-war, and I prefer peaceful resolution over violence. By definition I am a pacifist. But, that does not mean I will let someone simply walk all over me or my loved ones without opposition. It doesn’t mean I will simply resort to violence either.
The world is a complicated place, and to treat everything as if it’s an “either, or” situation does everyone a disservice and only feeds into the overall problem.
I believe Orwell was speaking of the Spanish Revolution (1936), in which he fought on the side of the socialists.
Pacifism is a great ideal, and (I believe) a lot of conflicts can be solved by honest negotiation. Once the shooting starts, though, the time for pacifism has ended. In the US, right now, it’s not clear whether the shooting has started. I mean: ICE is definitely shooting people; people are definitely being injured and dying as result of the administration’s actions, but it’s not Shooting-shooting, and it still seems like avoidable, poor-policy harms. The question is: will it escalate to civil war level violence? And if it does, will strict pacifists already have blocked any hope of resistance?
Considering how this has gone for indiginous and black people of your country, who’ve been dealing with this problem for the last few hundred years, I don’t think the issue is with the pacifists/non violent activists on your side. It’s with the sheer fucking scale of the power imbalance you’re facing.
Like yeah there’s now more people in your country being shot at, but the people doing the shooting still have significantly more power.
Are there enough of you collectively now being shot at, to be able to take on the basically all of capitalism that’s backing your government, funding your millitary, and controlling your economy?
It’s fucking bleak thinking about this stuff. Like even with more Luigi’s, how many will it take before the people holding the cards to make things considerably worse for most of society?
I’ve had this comic saved in my phone for a while now and it seems relevant. What with how well he predicted the future, Orwell being so against pacifists is painfully ironic.
Yeah, Orwell had the clarity of fighting against a literal right wing coup. A clear, decisive event to separate the non-violent time from the violent time, and violence instigated by people without even nominal consent of The People.
The slow rise of militancy, matched with spreading desperation, at least so far lacks a trigger. And in the particular case of the US, we have, like, 30 shootings a day just being us. That makes it a lot less shocking when a couple of those are government shootings. We let the right wingers take over the government (arguably, 250 years ago), and they’re just slowly boiling the frog.
The frog jumps out, what does that make us?
If you want the real answer…
spoiler
I don’t have the reference handy, but the gist is: They use pithed frogs, and they do not jump out of slowly heated water. Intact frogs do jump out, but you can’t know if that’s because of the heat or some other random frog thought. Frogs have really elaborate reflex systems (eg: wiping reflex ), and a pithed frog given a sudden, large noxious stimulation will do something a lot like a jump, but the neural pathways accommodate to a slowly changing stimulus and fail to elicit movement.
I’m in the UK and while shit is obviously different here, it’s still very much the same in some respects. We’re all slowly being boiled and there’s basically nothing we can really do.
🙏
Get out of here with your nuance!
Conditional pacifism
Tapping into just war theory conditional pacifism represents a spectrum of positions departing from positions of absolute pacifism. One such conditional pacifism is the common pacificism, which may allow defense but is not advocating a default defensivism[10] or even interventionism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacifism#Types
Well that was fucking easy. /thread
Arguing against violence and war when that is possible is fine.
Arguing fanatically to lay down weapons when one side is very clearly not going to do that, is very stupid.
In the sense that there will always be people who are going to be tricked into a fascist, violent, superiority cult, because there are just that many people, and in the sense that sometimes and regularly moderate or intense violence will be necessary to stop them, because some people are closed off to arguments and peaceful discussion, opposing that violence is taking their side, yes.
And it’s fine if you disagree, I simply think you have really finished thinking about it. The reply is always going to be a “… but what if they just stopped being fanatic fascists” and I think that is not how that works.
So ultimately I agree with Orwell.
Yeah probably, and without helping at all
Strongly anti-pacifism they never recognize the violence of the current state of affairs as violence.
Pacifism as a virtue is fine, though it won’t stop actual Nazis. it’s apathy and disillusionment that are killing us
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
- MLK
Malcolm X and The Black Panthers are an inconvenient thing to teach aren’t they?
this was the first quote I thought of after having read Orwell’s. I think they’re both talking around the same thing here and I agree with them on it.
Pacifism is a virtue for those who will be unaffected either way, or who benefit from the status quo. More to the point, it’s convenient and easy to do nothing while feeling morally superior. And it’s the position of people who look at the violence of the conflict and conclude that both sides are the same. Because they don’t want to inconvenience themselves with having to look any deeper, learn anything more, or get involved in any manner. Afterall… it doesn’t affect them, so its easy to be a smug pacifist.
This is something that’s been bothering me for a whilst. The attitude of I’ll sit this one out, it’s been bred into people for a whilst now. I was explaining the troubles to my daughter a whilst back and we were borderline looking at media during the time. It’s made me question not only my bias but my view on violence. I hate it, but conflict came in many different way in those days. We have been taught to move away from conflict to more passive attitudes. And conveniently at the same time our rights have been eroded. It does however need to be used in the right way.
I.e., “What are your thoughts on people who are against people who are against people who are violently against people?”
