Why Are You A Pacifist?

Dear Internauts,

I promise I won't make all my blog posts from here on out just my responses to Quora.com questions, but if I continue to ramble on long enough over there, I figure I might as well share such pretentious insights with you for content-sake. Hope ya don't mind.

SO...

WHY ARE YOU A PACIFIST? 
 
Mostly, it’s because wars are largely unnecessary, driven by dehumanization, overwhelmingly tragic in the unjust scope of their consequences, and usually lead to more wars.

In studying history in school, whenever we’d learn about the context in which a war took place, it seemed to me that steps toward diplomacy could have taken place earlier on in the timeline to avoid violent conflict. This isn’t some unique revelation. If non-violent resolutions pass before escalation into armed conflict, then there’s less of an excuse to escalate. After certain steps are taken toward violence, the balance can become so tilted it’s nearly impossible to convince military and government leaders to consider non-violent alternatives. This is why the best—or at least most popular—arguments against pacifism tend to employ points in history after most powers had already declared the other side to be irreconcilably opposed to their goals. If you believe that the time for negotiation, compromise, dialogue, or even hope for nonviolence has passed, anyone arguing against violence may seem to be naive, uninformed, unpatriotic, or traitorous.

I wish I knew more about history to offer an huge list of blatant examples where negotiations could have stopped wars before they began, but I’m a pacifist because I believe this is the case with every single war that has ever happened. (I do remember thinking when I first learned about the Treaty of Versailles how the way World War I ended really screwed Germany up in just the right way to make eventual room for the Third Reich.)


If you argue for pacifism during an armed conflict—such as arguing that the conflict ends entirely via 280 characters or a phrase short enough to fit on a picket sign—you end up pushing against a boulder that’s been hurtling downhill for a while, usually longer than the regular citizenry, the news, or history books could tell you. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t push the ends of wars once they’ve started, but rather it helps to understand that a war isn’t just a war but rather a complex stack of circumstances. Someone who believes the violent conflict is worthwhile may have reasons completely separate from the official talking points of government/military leaders. Similarly, plenty of people join the military for personal reasons having little to do with a grand, international, sociopolitical agenda. There are those who will broadly support any conflict their country is a part of due to their brand of nationalism, but I like to think most folks are more complex and thinking than that.


In fact, I think most people would say they are anti-war in a general sense. They can look at wars in the past or even present conflicts and find something justifiable in them. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of the “just war” ideology, especially because of my religious upbringing. This later conflicted with the whole “love thy neighbor” thing, but that’s a different, long-winded story.

 The key is that once bombs start dropping, it becomes easy to perpetuate the mind-set that anything your side does is justified because of something the other side did. At least in the US, we learn so little about the history of the Middle East in school that all armed conflict is seen by most of the population over here through a lens of extrapolating the tiniest shreds of new information through anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and pro-Military sectarianism. Now, as I do my own research into all the places tax-payer funded bombs are falling, I keep finding all these ways that earlier meddling by the US actually ties heavily into if not directly causes so many factors leading into further violence and conflict. I don’t mean that people can’t make peace for themselves in the face of US intervention, but historically we’ve made it very hard all across the globe in the name of economic interests dressed up like ideological agendas.

Education is key to building peace. Building understanding increases empathy whether it’s between two people or two billion.

Of course, there hasn’t been a time in my life when my country has not had a violent, armed presence in regular conflict somewhere in the world. I haven’t been around that long, but already I’ve seen more leaders act unilaterally to command acts of war against civilian population than my history books tell me happened in the previous century. That’s probably wrong, but not in the way you might hope it’s wrong.

If you don’t already believe it, I don’t think I can convince you that seeing another human being as a human being is a good thing. I don’t believe that killing a large group of people or even a single person solves the kinds of problems that usually lead to those sorts of tragedies.

We can’t un-bomb those hospitals or un-coup those democratically elected governments. We can’t get those lost lives back. However, we can start with peace in mind right now.

 Yes, that means electing leaders who plan to bring troops home and put more money into helping lives than taking them (or the machines that do so). Yes, plenty of leaders have promised this then gone back on their word once in office, but it’s worth considering for your vote nonetheless. I imagine learning about all the scary stuff going on in the world, being handed the nuclear launch codes, and having regular meetings with the highest in the mass-murder echelon on the daily may have some strong effect on a politicians sense of morality.

More importantly, it means remembering that a country, a tribe, a religion, an ethnic or racial group, or any other human collective is far more than their leaders. Rarely is it that your average person starts a war with another country. We talk about fighting some vague “them” while also talking about the individuals on our side doing the fighting. On the other hand, we do plenty to support the troops via some bland, meaningless slogan or by burning Nike stuff, but little to help high school kids learn about, participate in, and afford opportunities for their future other than military life. (On a side note: how about donating that Nike stuff to homeless vets instead.)

Finally, I’ve been called nearly every insult in the books for being anti-war. My current thoughts on pacifism do extend into interpersonal conflicts as well. Conflict resolution education can do a lot to help solve problems before they become violent in the first place. It may not seem like it sometimes in our current internet culture, but many people do really prefer not fighting over every difference.

The more we learn about one another, the more we can build peaceful lives, neighborhoods, and eventually nations.

I understand when people say I’m too naive or uninformed or cowardly to get what the military is and does and why. I’ve got a lot to learn, sure. We all do. However, I must insist that pacifism is not inherently cowardly. Complacent inaction in the face of injustice is both cowardly and dangerously corrupting, but so is resorting to violence because of tradition, availability, ease, or popular support.

It’s easy to see people far away as less than human. It’s easy to see the person standing in front of us in line as less than human or the person across the counter or the person in another car or posting something we don’t like online.

I would never say that risking your life for what you believe in is easy. What’s hard is caring enough about humanity to work through the complex mire of differences in order to risk everything for the chance at making peace before we’re too caught up in war to find a way out.

And yes, I do believe that there is always a way out.

Thanks for reading,
Odist