"While the Allies were at war with Nazi Germany and engaged in a massive military campaign of unprecedented scale against it, they did little if anything to either stop the ongoing slaughter of millions of Jews and other minorities, or to save and absorb refugees." -Wikipedia "International Response to the Holocaust"
"The more I learn about the [2nd world] war, the more I understand that the pacifists were the only ones, during a time of catastrophic violence, who repeatedly put forward proposals that had any chance of saving a threatened people. They weren’t naïve, they weren’t unrealistic—they were psychologically acute realists." -Nicholson Baker, from "Why I’m a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War" in Harper's Magazine, May 2011.
(If you plan on not reading this essay through, then track down and read this article "Why Nicholson Baker is a Pacifist," which inspired it. Baker wrote in Harper's Magazine in May 2011 "Why I'm a Pacifist", and I found the article profoundly validating and reassuring as an emerging Pacifist, or a summary of Baker's key arguments.)
Just as, in our brains, the pathways we have forged are more likely to be used and re-used until another synapses and neural pathways are created, we are apt to choose the paths which are known to be safest-- and if not safest, at least most predictable. History only repeats itself because we weakly and lazily choose to repeat it.
What brought me to this thought?
A few sundays ago I listened to "Cross Country Checkup" while I was driving. The subject was: "Should Canada do something to help Syria?" Should we provide military support, either through sending Canadian troops or supporting the rebels with arms or otherwise? Should we be involved in this civil war somehow?
I can't pretend that I know more than most other Canadians about Syria, Bashar Al-Assad, or this conflict, and I'm not going to propose watertight, carefully thought-out solutions here, but I kept thinking while I was listening "what about Pacifism?" Where in this conversation--which tended often to be a dichotomous argument between war and indifference-- where is the talk of Pacifism?
We've got it in our heads that the only way to deal with tyrants is by meeting them with violence. Consider that pacifism cannot be fair-weather pacifism, opposed to all wars except just ones. When anti-war movements and protests gain traction, I think this usually has to more do with disdain for imperialism than advocacy of peace. We shouldn't confuse these sentiments-- we can end up believing imperialism is ok when war or physical violence isn't involved.
Nicholson Baker's makes some worthwhile points about pacifism-- that Hitler had already used Jews as hostages earlier in the war, and potentially used them as hostages to keep the U.S. from joining the war-- that there was communication which suggested the Nazis were ready to accelerate the Final Solution in response to the Americans getting involved in the war. Among other prominent Jews, American wartime pacifist Abraham Kaufman lobbied the U.S. to negotiate with Hitler in exchange for the lives of Jewish refugees-- that's assuming one of the less anti-semitic Allied countries would agree to receive them.
Separate from our military actions, our Government's policies towards immigration and refugees can do a lot to prevent slaughter, and to prevent tyrants being tyrannical. History only repeats itself because we weakly and lazily choose to repeat it.
A basic premise of democracy is that solutions only become watertight as the thoughts and intentions of all citizens and experts are hashed out. This starts with intention: if we are going to battle, there are binders full of military strategists who'll sit down and discuss the details and challenge each other's viewpoints. The solutions we employ are products of these private conversations, and of the broader public conversation-- all the thought, debate, information which is shared through media and filters its way into individual conversations in coffeeshops, radio call-in shows, and in newspapers and ultimately the houses of parliament. Which one comes first is a chicken and egg discussion.
What if we committed the public conversation to pursuing the responses that pacifism could provide to war? Maybe the ideas would come into circulation, and maybe some good would come of it.
