Non-Violence

This posting deals with my uncertainties, over many years, about pacifism. Pacifism was a pressing issue during the Vietnam-War era, for me and many of my friends (although I was a Canadian citizen, I was living in the US from 1964, and subject to the draft from 1968). If I could have demonstrated that I had a spiritual, religious commitment to non-violence, I might have been deferred from the draft. I wasn’t sure I could make that claim.

As it happened, I was deferred for a different reason, a technicality really, so I never had to resolve the question. But the question has remained important to me, even after all these decades. This essay is an attempt to bring it to a conclusion.

I should be clear what I think the pacifist position means. It does not mean passivity. I have seen articles claiming that pacifists simply refuse to engage in violence and are therefore willing to let evil, oppressive regimes dominate. Apparently they think that whatever evil those regimes would impose would be less harmful than violent opposition. This does not describe the pacifist movements with which I am familiar, and to which I am attracted. The great pacifist movements have been…activist. Pacifists worked tirelessly and at enormous risk for fundamental social change. They did not simply identify evil; they opposed evil. If the word pacifism connotes passivity, then a better phrase for their movements is non-violent resistance.

My attraction to non-violent resistance has come from three sources: the Quakers, Gandhi and the US Civil Rights Movement.

I spent many years associated with the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, for whom non-violence was not just a good idea but a spiritual obligation. My former wife Betsy and I attended Quaker silent meetings (their form of religious service) fairly often, and in the summer of 1966 we led a work camp sponsored by the AFSC, the American Friends Service Committee. In 1967, the AFSC asked us to undertake a two-year humanitarian mission in Vietnam, and we were tempted, but eventually declined. I have never been sure that was the right decision.

The Quakers’ spiritual belief is that “there is that of God in every person,” and from that belief comes their commitment to pacifism. Killing means destroying something sacred. They opposed slavery before the Civil War, taking a leading role in the “underground railway.” They have always opposed oppression and warfare, using non-violent means.

I was inspired by Mohandas Gandhi who over decades led the non-violent struggle for the independence of India. He and his followers demonstrated, and they suffered. They took symbolic action against the British Empire, actions such as spinning their own cotton, producing their own salt without paying the imperial tax, marching in protest. When they were attacked physically, as they often were, they declined to fight back physically, but instead non-violently demonstrated their oppression. Eventually they were successful in driving the British out of the Indian sub-continent. That story is too complex to be summed up in a few words, but sustained non-violent resistance was central to the Indian independence movement.

The US Civil Rights Movement had numerous leaders, but transcendent among them was the pacifist Martin Luther King, Jr. He was inspired, in part, by Gandhi’s non-violence. I took part in the movement, in a small way, as one of many marching in demonstrations. The non-violent protesters bore witness, often suffered and, as the central word of their anthem proclaimed, “overcame." Among the victories of the movement were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The victories were not total, and today the country is still dealing with the legacy of racism. It would be a much poorer country, however, in the absence of the Civil Rights Movement.

All three movements were spiritual at their core, but the Indian and Civil Rights movements struggled to maintain that core. Gandhi’s coalition of Hindus and Moslems collapsed in violence at the moment of independence, while the Civil Rights movement was torn by the conflict between non-violence and Black Power. The victories were transformative but incomplete.

How did movements that rejected violence achieve the power to effect broad social change? They achieved it by the example of their non-violence, which appealed to the consciences of a sufficient number of their oppressors.

As far as I can tell, non-violence succeeded, when it succeeded, only in democratic countries. The Indians did not touch the consciences of the occupying British administrators and soldiers; except in isolated cases. They did, however, influence the British people, who were participants in a democracy, however imperfect. In the end, the British public could not stomach the spectacle of endless violence visited upon peaceful protesters by their troops, and reported by a free press.

The non-violent Civil Rights Movement did not change the hearts and minds of the leaders of the Jim Crow system. In the end, however, a consensus of American whites could not tolerate the images on their TV sets, night after night, of peaceful protesters being arrested, hosed, beaten, attacked by dogs and other weapons, and murdered.

That is the pacifist, non-violent movement as I have known it, admired it and, to a small extent, participated in it. It is an active, fighting movement, a movement to change the world.

Could non-violence work against oppressors embedded in a profoundly undemocratic state, where public opinion could not change public policies? The central challenge for contemporary pacifists always is, could pacifism have defeated Hitler? That was the central question for me.

I had older pacifist, Quaker friends (all gone now), who refused to take part in the Second World War. They regarded Hitler as a monster and his regime as the embodiment of evil. They had no illusion that if Hitler won, their children would live in an acceptable world. They believed, however, that non-violent resistance to the Nazis could have defeated them, and that non-violence could bring about the kind of world they believed in.

I have struggled with this. In the end, though, I believe my Quaker friends were wrong. Non-violent resistance was the right strategy against the British Empire in India, and it was the right strategy against Jim Crow. The victories did not come easily, but eventually a consensus of public opinion in Britain and in the US turned against the oppressors in their midst.

Non-violence would not have worked against Hitler. It might have appealed to the consciences of ordinary Germans, but ordinary Germans lacked agency in the Nazi state. The fascist leaders lacked consciences, while the ordinary people lacked power in the autocratic, undemocratic state. I honor my old pacifist friends, but I stand in awe of the millions who joined the armed services to fight the Nazis, many of whom were killed, so that my generation and succeeding generations could have decent lives.

I realize that this stance on non-violence—that it cannot be a universal, spiritual commitment, but rather must be viewed strategically, as sometimes appropriate and sometimes not—is what weakened both the Indian and the American movements. I see no way around it.

It is a hard conclusion for me to come to, but my conclusion is that I am sometimes, not always, a pacifist. I would not have been able to make an honest claim to the Draft Board that I am always, and spiritually, opposed to military resistance.

I know, military resistance means sometimes taking the life of another person.

John Isbister