Topics Ethics

Question Sometimes people seem to think pacifism is passive-ism, and that to interject or intervene in some way in a potentially violent scenario, is of itself violent, or likely to bring violence on oneself. I call myself a trainee pacifist (and have done for nearly 30 years) because I don't have the answers to what pacifists should do in these situations. Any ideas? thanks

Accepted:
March 19, 2006

Comments

Well, in some ways it's a matter of definition. One might plausibly, I think, distinguish between pacifism and non-violence as a positive form of political struggle (though I think in practice most pacifists haven't made this distinction and the line is often blurry). Pacificism by this account would be negatively defined as the refusal to engage in violent acts, turning the other cheek as it were, without any attempt to provoke violence. Non-violence struggle often includes pacifism but would also involve the positive objective of trying to achieve some political end, perhaps by eliciting a violent response. Those engaged in non-violent struggle, however, aren't always pacifists. They simply think that non-violent techniques are in the relevant contexts the most effective techniques. Some involved in the Palestinian struggle, for example the ISM, use non-violent tactics but aren't pacifists where being a pacifist is defined as holding to the principle that one should never be violent.

Typically, non-violent action involves positioning oneself in a position of defiant obstruction to what's taken to be a repressive institution or set of practices--for example, blacks sitting at lunch counters where they were excluded by law, the Gdansk shipyard workers going on strike and occupying the waterfront, Danish citizens under Nazi occupation engaging in work slowdowns. Doing so often results in a violent response, and the non-violent actor expects this and sometimes (not always) desires it. Desires it not for sado-masochistic reasons but typically to expose to a watching world the violence of the system the non-violent political agent opposes.

Many cases in practice called pacifistic are hybrids of these two postive and negative forms. André Trocmé, the pastor of the French village of le Chambon, which was in large measure the inspiration for Albert Camus's The Plague, was a Christian pacifist who with many others of the village sheltered Jews during the Vichy and Nazi occupations of WWII. Trocmé, unlike MLK and Gandhi, didn't intend to elicit a violent response, but he did expect it and was prepared to face it pacifistically should it come. He was himself arrested and sent to a concentration camp. His conduct, however, wasn't purely negative. He preached resistance to the occupiers using not violence but the "weapons of the spirit," including resistance by defying the law and sheltering Jews. Here we have a case that's not strictly negative but not a positive provocation either; Trocmé would have been happy to have been left alone by the authorities. MLK, in Birmingham, by contrast, needed exposure in the news media; he needed the world to see the violence of segregation in order to subvert it.

In any case, I think it's quite clear that exposing the violence of a repressive system by drawing it into the open is not itself a form of violence. The charge is a simplistic, cavilling bit of sophistry. Non-violent action, however, is often deeply intertwined with a system of violence, and it does sometimes both expect and intentionally provoke violence. But not, I think, essentially so. One can imagine a world in which violence didn't exist, wasn't expected, and was perhaps even unknown but where people engaged in forms of non-violent struggle (strikes, protest marches, sit-ins, etc.). That's because non-violent struggle isn't essentially violent. Part of what it does is exemplify a possible way of engaging in political struggle that doesn't involve violence. By contrast, the use of armaments or batons or rape or torture or dogs cannot be anything but violent.