Pacifism is the view that war is morally unacceptable and unjustifiable. While there are few who would argue that war is ever a wholly good thing, pacifism is nonetheless often subject to a criticism that it does not acknowledge that some wars are a ‘necessary evil’.
In a pacifist clarion call just as the Second World War was about to take hold, Vera Brittain elegantly expressed her pacifist philosophy thus: ‘All that a pacifist can undertake – but it is a very great deal – is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.’ The war that followed proved an ideological battleground for those in favour and against the pacifist ideal. To many observers, Hitler had created just the kind of regime that rendered pacifism untenable and demanded a military response.
For example, in 1941 George Orwell wrote: ‘Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.’ Pacifism, though, is a nuanced philosophy. While the absolute pacifist believes that no war may ever be justified, there are many other ‘conditional pacifists’ who accept that war is inevitable under certain circumstances. Some may even agree to take a role in a war effort in a non-fighting capacity (such as serving as stretcher-bearers).
The father of pacifism
Gautama Buddha (c. 6th century BCE) arguably founded the first expressly pacifist movement, demanding that his followers abstain from inflicting violence on any living creature. However, pacifism as an active political ideology took on a modern guise around the 18th century as part of a general call for the democratization of states – a process some hoped would transfer power away from bellicose monarchs to a peace-loving populace. During the 19th century, over which war continued to cast its shadow, there was a surge in membership of national and international pacifist organizations. Yet, in terms of absolute numbers, the 20th century saw the most war-related deaths of any century.
In the face of the existential risk posed by nuclear weapons, pacifism found a new relevance. Albert Einstein was prominent among them, making a strong case for pacifism even as his scientific discoveries made possible the theoretical development of the atom bomb. Pacifism also found powerful new adherents in, variously, Gandhi as leader of the Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King as spiritual figurehead of the US civil rights movement. Both would have felt sympathy with the words of the great Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus from 1515:
If there is any human activity which should be approached with caution, or rather which should be avoided by all possible means, resisted and shunned, that activity is war, for there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more persistently ingrained, more hateful, more unworthy in every respect of a man . . .