Pacifism

PACIFISM. A rich worldview that developed from a range of sources, secular and religious, pacifism has the single unifying theme that violence is rejected as a means of resolving social conflict. Uniquely among major radical perspectives, it is “Eastern” as well as “Western” and in that sense among the most thoroughly internationalist. Pacifists differ on whether they might use violence in extreme personal situations such as rape or murder, but agree upon the rejection of violence during civil wars, revolutions, or conflict between nation-states. Whether articulated via Gandhi’s Hinduism, Tolstoy’s Christianity, or in the secular humanism of the socialist and anarchist movements, pacifism has always emphasized the role of the individual sense of morality against any organized ideology of violence.

Because of their opposition to the state, pacifists have not generally fitted into Marxist-Leninist organizations, but rather allied themselves as loose caucuses within socialist or social-democratic movements. While building some distinct institutions, often at the edges of socialist or liberal religious movements, they have largely acted as individuals upon a wide spectrum of available arenas.

Pacifist influence developed slowly in the modern Left. Although “nonresistant” agitation flourished in reform circles of the 1830s–1850s, pacifists played little apparent role in the immigrant-dominated U.S. socialist movements of the post–Civil War period. Nor did they revive significantly within the new Socialist party until the nation plunged into war. Widespread anti-war sentiments often took on a semi-pacifist flavoring within the Socialist Party at large, and took organizational form in the Fellowship of Reconciliation and its socialistic magazine, the World Tomorrow. Largely Protestant and middle class, a circle of prominent pacifists became increasingly prominent in a reduced Socialist Party, especially with the ascendance of Norman Thomas, himself a nearly devout pacifist, to party leadership.

During the Great Depression, pacifist sentiments fairly swept many college campuses. Asserting a US version of the Oxford Pledge (refusal to “fight for King and Country”), undergraduates expressed their fear of the coming war in strikes, marches, and conventions. The threat of world fascism and the predominance of the anti-pacifist Communist Party during the later 1930s eclipsed these moods, although Norman Thomas and a badly diminished Socialist Party remained pacifistically anti-war until the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. Thereafter, many pacifists did alternative service in mental hospitals (ending the infamous “locked wards”) or did time in jail.

Public revulsion at atomic weapons and the devastation of war generally prompted a sharp rise of pacifist sentiments after the war. Pacifists pioneered public radio, an idea germinated during prison terms, by establishing station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, a station that promoted pacifist views and served as a model for other subsequent community-based stations. Likewise, pacifists played an active role in the publication of critical magazines (especially Dwight Macdonald’s Politics magazine) and many poetry or avant-garde artistic publications, especially in the Bay Area. Out of fundamentally anarcho-pacifist concerns, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore and its famous poetry series (introducing, among others, anarcho-pacifist Allen Ginsberg) became a major cultural resource of the 1950s–1960s.

The civil rights movement buoyed up the prestige of Gandhi’s work and the value of nonviolence, especially in the face of racist attacks. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, acceptance and articulation of pacifist philosophy, especially in the face of collapse by existing Left ideologies, provided a new opening for pacifism. The Congress of Racial Equality, founded by veterans of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (a tax refusal and direct action group), helped launch the civil disobedience tactics challenging segregation in public facilities. The participation of pacifists such as Bayard Rustin in Dr. King’s (and other civil rights) campaigns, not greatly noted at the time outside pacifist circles, added to the long-run significance of the civil rights years.

Meanwhile, a socialist pacifism of sorts had taken various forms. A small group of World War II prison veterans, including Dave Dellinger, Jim Peck, and Ralph DiGia, founded the Committee for Nonviolent Revolution in 1946 with a program that included the nonviolent seizure of the means of production by workers. This small group merged two years later with Peacemakers, a radical pacifist group which A. J. Muste had helped establish and which was moving toward a “Third Camp” position—rejecting the political leadership of the United States and Soviet Union—on the Cold War.

These activists forged a powerful new means of expression, when, with special support from the War Resisters League (WRL), they set up Liberation magazine. At a time of extreme political conformity, Liberation found wide acceptance among a proto-New Left, in part by linking the old notions of anti-monopoly and anti-imperialist republicanism with the decentralist and nonhierarchical themes of the new generation. Liberation continued to publish until 1977, involving most of the major national writers around the New Left and establishing a presence far beyond the pacifist community. Among its regular contributors were Paul Goodman, Barbara Deming, Staughton Lynd, and David Dellinger. WIN magazine, with a smaller but more intensely pacifist following in the 1960s–1970s, became in effect a journalistic “Workshop in Nonviolence” (hence its name) for its founding WRL and a somewhat more general peace publication during later years.

During the 1960s pacifism had an enormous impact upon American political and social movements, ranging from the nonviolent campaigns of Martin Luther King to the organization of farm workers by César Chávez. Pacifist organizations such as the WRL experienced their highest membership levels, as WRL itself led the first draft card burnings and attempted direct action “closings” of army induction centers. Radical pacifists played a central role in the anti-war coalitions, frequently mediating conflicts among other elements and setting the tone of events. Following United States withdrawal from Vietnam, pacifist organizations inevitably declined, but continued to exert an influence on the Left.

Such varied movements as attempted disruption of missile sites, boycotts against war toys, Greenpeace invasion of nuclear test sites, and nonviolent protests by the homeless carried forward crucial elements of pacifism’s historical premises. The end of the Cold War was almost irrelevant to the pacifist project, as there was no diminution of bloody regional conflicts. Aggravating this reality for Americans was that the role of the United States as the world’s largest supplier of arms grew rather than diminished.

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