Times for dangerous pacifism

Former American diplomat Philip Marshall Brown complained in 1915 in the prestigious magazine

The North American Review

that his country was being “bombarded by pamphlets, speeches, sermons and articles in the press trying to demonstrate that the present war is the result of militarism.” ”. Brown wanted to denounce the dangers of pacifism, essentially its naivety and lack of realism when it came to analyzing the reasons for the Great War, preaching internationalism, and opposing US intervention in it. Judging by the fate of some of his contemporaries who ended up in prison for defending peace, pacifism generates more than just discomfort in times of war, being perceived as a danger by governments. History repeated itself during World War II, the Vietnam War and other more recent conflicts and again today, in a Europe that several political leaders define as “pre-war”, thanks to Russian expansionism and the reverberations of the conflict in the Middle East. Those who raise the need to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine are no longer described only as naive, but as being in favor of the enemy, in this case the Russian Government. Similarly, in many countries those who have demonstrated for peace in Gaza have been perceived as complicit in Hamas terrorism.

A brief review of the contemporary history of pacifism shows how the pacifist effervescence that Europe and the United States experienced in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century was replaced by the “glorification” of war, “the only hygiene of the world,” that declared the futurist avant-garde in the 1910s, at the dawn of the First World War. The efforts of the numerous pacifist societies and newspapers founded in the previous decades by freethinkers and businessmen, motivated by fatigue after the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the American Civil War and other conflicts, were of little use. The intense work of personalities such as the Austrian Bertha von Suttner also failed to stop the umpteenth drift of war initiated by the European powers. Von Suttner, anti-war activist and author of the influential novel

Down with the Guns!

, she crossed paths with the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel in Paris, beginning a correspondence with him that most likely encouraged him to bequeath a part of her estate to annually reward pacifist work. Calls for workers to embrace the internationalist cause and not align themselves with the imperialist projects of their respective national governments failed. Pacifism, closely associated with the workers' cause and feminism, began to be persecuted by governments. An example is the popular American anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman, who was sent to prison for plotting against mandatory military service in 1917 in her country. Or the French feminist and pacifist activist Hélène Brion, imprisoned that same year for distributing “defeatist propaganda” in her country.

On the other hand, the same year in which Marshall Brown signed his article and tens of thousands of young people were bleeding to death in the European trenches, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India with his wife, Kasturba Makhanji, after a long stay in South Africa. There he would undertake the largest campaign of peaceful resistance in modern and contemporary history. Step by step, over three decades and without using violence, he led the Asian nation towards independence from the British Empire. Inspired by the first Christianity that he knew through the writings of pacifist authors such as the Russian Léon Tolstoy, but also by the Hindu concept of

ahimsa

or non-violence and respect for life, he knew how to convince millions of Indians to put the principles into practice. of what he called

satyagraha

or 'force of truth'. Under the premise that enmity ends up fading in the face of justice and non-violence, the movement implemented a set of civil disobedience actions: from the refusal to abide by the monopoly of the British authorities on salt,

illegally collecting salt,

to the boycott of textiles imported from the metropolis, weaving their own fabrics.

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The victory of Gandhi and his movement over the British occupation is often considered a victory for pacifism. For decades, this feat, with all its possible shadows, served as an example to other oppressed nations and inspired other emancipatory leaders of the 20th century such as Martin Luther King Jr., Thích Nhất Hạnh or Nelson Mandela. Taking into account the resurgence of nationalism and warmongering that we are experiencing, not only in Europe, but in other regions of the world, it should not be surprising that the current Indian Government tries to reduce Gandhi's prominence to give it to figures like Subhas Chandra Bose. Founder of the Indian National Army, Bose requested the help of the Axis powers to liberate India through military means, although he was unable to materialize this intervention.

From a certain nationalist perspective, and even more so in a pre-war or war context, pacifism has little noble or praiseworthy and is rather associated with cowardice and betrayal of the country. This was also experienced by the Vietnamese monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, founder of committed Buddhism, who exercised his pacifist activism during the Vietnam War. Nhất Hạnh's refusal to take sides on either side while carrying out humanitarian work on both sides earned him condemnation from both the pro-American regime in South Vietnam and the communists in the North, eventually forcing him to take refuge in France. In

Feeling the Peace

, he writes: “There must be people who can relate to both parties, understand the suffering of each, and tell each party about the other […and thus] help promote understanding, meditation, and reconciliation between nations in conflict.

The reverend and activist Martin Luther King Jr., to whom Nhất Hạnh addressed a letter urging him to openly denounce the war in Vietnam, saw his popularity seriously diminished when he expressed his condemnation of the American intervention in his famous speech at the Riverside Church in New York in 1967. Newspapers such as

The New York Times

and

The Washington Post,

which had supported him until then in his fight for the civil rights of the African-American population, criticized him for linking two supposedly different causes: civil rights and the war in Vietnam. . For King, racism, militarism, and poverty had become part of the problem. Like Gandhi, who was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in 1948, King paid with his life for his pacifist and universalist ideals. His confessed murderer, James Earl Ray, an ex-convict white supremacist, later claimed his innocence, giving rise to all kinds of speculation about the involvement of the United States government in the assassination. A controversy similar to that continued to generate by the assassination of the pacifist and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986, despite its formal resolution.

Seeking peace is an activity as risky as it is indispensable. There is an urgent need at this time for a strong pacifist leadership that questions the need to continue fueling the endless cycle of war and evokes, at least, the possibility of finding other channels to resolve the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the one that grips the Middle East.

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