No neutral on a moving train.
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.
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.
Orwell couldn’t be more wrong about this, in my opinion.
Pacifism doesn’t mean inaction, it means opposing the use of violence as a way of resolving disputes.
There are lots of ways to resolve disputes that don’t involve violence, but they usually require significantly more effort and creativity than simply shooting someone in the face.
Anyone can change their mind, I firmly believe that, so I’m not going to generalize and say all people who are opposed to pacifism are evil or inherently violent themselves, but the inability to even imagine that there are alternatives to war and violence is a failure of one’s ability to empathize with others.
Empathy can be a superpower, lack of empathy can cause untold suffering.
The right to be a pacifist is upheld by the people willing to use violence to uphold it.
Pacifism, in its most extreme form, is simply an unsustainable ideology, because you cannot oppose an adversary that is committed to subduing you with violence unless you are willing to use violence to stop them.
This smells like rainbows and friendship. You cannot fathoms the worst of humanity. You cannot truely empathize with them because your mind is so wildly different and your ability to empathize is part of that.
Sure anyone can change their mind but to think you can make such change realistically in this reality in all cases is so childish and outright foolish it amazes me adults believe this.
Yeh it’s like the idea you can understand a serial killer or a brutalist. You shouldn’t. They are different and thinking you can fix them with love puts you at danger.
Orwell is a child of his time though. If I recall correctly he went to Spain to report on the conflict (civil war) and was so shocked(?) that he volunteered to fight against the literal Nazis. Then getting told “put down your weapons” is the context I read into this quote.
Or to take your example: it’s about someone telling you to not fight back instead of helping safe others.
While I agree with you in times of peace and between individuals it’s more nuanced: when physically under attack your options shrink.
This is the part where this quote holds true in my opinion: When you’re confronted with a situation that already turned violent. Or, worse for me personally, I’d there is no shared common value system.
How do you mediate with someone who not only is willing to kill but has the conviction that it’s the only right thing to do?
And I don’t mean that as a rhetorical question, I have no idea … And my own moral compass is fucked up by now and spinning in circles.
Try being a pacifist Jew in Nazi Germany to see how much good that will do to you and how many alternative solutions you can find or how many soldiers you can convince. That is the context of the quote shared there, pacifist solutions should always be preferred, but sometimes that is not an option, it’s the tolerance paradox.
Pacifism in itself is fine, 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
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.
Malcolm X and The Black Panthers are an inconvenient thing to teach aren’t they?
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!
I mean, are you just going to let someone kill you and your family?
Because that’s what legit pacifism requires, you submitting to the violence of others without resistance.
Pure pacifism relies on an idealized view of humanity’s capacity for change.
Something like “by allowing me and my family to maybe be killed, we are helping to create a more peaceful world that will change people like my killer into a peaceful person. Who knows, in the instant before they murder us, maybe they will have a change of heart”
I think there’s an extent to which showing others kindness can help to change others’ behavior, but it’s really taking it to a ridiculous extreme if you apply it to like… your family being massacred by a really bad person/people. By that point, they’re too far gone and you should really do what you need to do.
That’s not what pacifism means. Pacifism means striving to avoid violence. Just not being a violent psychopath
Pacifism is not monolithic.
However, refusal to oppose oppression of any kind is, at a minimum, compliance with that oppression.
I.e., “What are your thoughts on people who are against people who are against people who are violently against people?”
Pacifism is an ideal, not a reality. I have read too many books and listened to too many podcasts, where human decency without force to back it is utterly crushed.
It ain’t nice to hurt people. But is worse to be unable to harm the people who don’t care about being a good person.
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.
You can support a group, but that doesn’t mean they’re on your side. And if you fight for them, and then they win, and then they fuck you over anyway, then you lost. Then what.
Fighting a war is nothing like fighting a person on the street. But even if you try to push the fighting a person on the street analogy, it still fails. If you know how to punch, and you’re fast, maybe you can punch the other person in the jaw and knock them out. But then you’ll have a broken hand, and you won the fight, but you still have to go to the hospital. Or maybe you could have run away and then you would have, I guess, lost the fight, but not really because you didn’t lose anything and your hand wouldn’t be broken. In other words, actually reality is not such a simple thing.
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.
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.
What he’s saying is just wrong, but I think behind his words somewhere is the assumption that pacifism isn’t an effective way to bring social change. There are many counterexamples.
Nonviolence has never resulted in positive social change. Every single nonviolent movement mentioned in every history textbook you’ve ever read existed alongside a violent one that actually got shit done, the only reason any ruling class ever conceded a goddamn thing was the threat of force, and the reason they don’t mention it in those history books is specifically to create more people like you who pose no threat to their rulers
All positive change is accomplished through violence? That’s a pretty extreme view.
Just curious, what would you say was the violent group responsible for the end of the Delano Grape boycott, after which union members won better working conditions and higher wages?
Pointing to any part of US labor history as an example of the success of nonviolence is fucking hilarious, every single strike that wasn’t ready and willing to commit violence got fucked inside out by pinkertons. You are historically illiterate.
Thanks, that was about as insightful as I assumed you’d be.
You have no credibility and nothing new to contribute to the conversation, I have no motive to put that effort in, go find your own insights
that pacifism isn’t an effective way to bring social change. There are many counterexamples.
There may be examples of pacifism being effective at bringing change, but that does not mean it will always be effective at bringing change or will always be an adequate response to a situation. If you have ever been attacked randomly, you will know this. Sitting on the floor cross legged like gandhi does not make some random axeman stop trying to kill you.
What he is saying is completely correct on the context that he is talking about the people insisting on pacific resistance to Fascism before WWII.
The person quoting him without context in a way that completely changes the meaning of his words is wrong, and one has to wonder if honest at all.
jorjor well
Orwell was wildly chauvinistic and 80% on board with fascism, going as far as to give the British government a list of suspected communists, noting the ones who were gay, at a time that was punishable by prison and/or castration.
But yeah, opposing an anti-war effort supports war, but it gets complicated when both sides are fascists. An American “pacifist” who wants to end the war in Ukraine by sending more weapons and money to Ukraine is not meaningfully different than a warmonger who supports the same policy. They might be worse as they can convince people who aren’t bloodthirsty ghouls that it’s just to send more bombs, each of which is a bad day for somebody, statistically mostly civilians. Conversely, a Russian “pacifist” who wants to end the war in Ukraine by sending another million Russians to Ukraine is not meaningfully different than Putin doing the same thing.
It’s different for actual wars of imperialism, say an Iranian or Cuban “pacifist” who wants to end the war by accepting foreign domination is just supporting fascism, which is closer to what Orwell was talking about if we’re a little charitable.
Fascists fighting fascists for corporate profits just as fascism intended.
100%
Its why I’m not a pacifist. Its why I don’t generally involve myself with left-ish protest movements, where non-violence is a higher priority than effectiveness when it comes to the metrics of success for an action. I view pacifism as being co-opted after the 1960’s and 70’s and used to cuckold resistance movements to state power. Government reshaped and reworked itself to both allow and also entirely ignore protest in this time. So sure. Go protest all you want. Its what the state wants you to do and how it wants you to funnel your resentment and anger at a lack of representation or function of government.
