PACIFISM
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The Argument for Anti-War Pacifism
The basis of this text is the argument I presented at the debate “Is there a just war?” organized by the Philosophy and Religion Department of Bergen Community College in New Jersey on November 30, 2023. It is a purely personal statement, somewhat modified through conversation with friends, not a summary of philosophical research. Though the call for pacifism as a personal ethical and religious goal is certainly an inspiring vision, something we should all ultimately strive for, bearing in mind the state of the world we live in today, the more urgent is the call for universal anti-war pacifism, its proximal goal being cessation of present and prevention of any future armed conflicts. This, I believe, can only be achieved by abandoning the very idea of war as an acceptable means of resolving international conflicts. Growing up in Europe where the memory of the WW2 was still very much alive, learning of its unbelievable atrocities and its human toll, I naively accepted as a truism that this experience will serve as a sufficient deterrent of any future war, that people will have finally clearly understood that no civilized, rational, not to mention empathic, beings could ever think of war as a justified collective venture. Of course, history has shaken me out of my naiveté, but I still believe universal pacifism is the only solution. I will support this position by several arguments, along with some pragmatic considerations that recommend peaceful negotiations over armed conflict. Finally, I will try to refute two main counterarguments to pacifism—the argument from self-defense and the dismissal of universal pacifism as an unrealistic dream.
War violates the basic human right—the right to life The right to life is unquestionably the basic human right, a precondition of any other rights we might have, so the moral prohibition against killing and its affirmative counterpart—the duty to save lives—are the cornerstones of any code of ethics. There is a universal agreement that killing is the worst of harms, premeditated murder an evil act deserving the harshest of punishments, so war as a “massive, systematic and deliberate killing of human beings” represents a compounded if not the worst evil. Since our moral intuitions about the evil of deliberate killing are clear, it is those who justify killing in war who should carry the burden of proof.
Depersonalization and dehumanization of all participants It is a clear moral imperative, famously endorsed by Kant, that other people should never be treated as means, that respect for our common humanity, our rationality, and personhood of others should have priority over any other concern, therefore it should override any religious, economic, national, or ethnic considerations. Respect for human life and our shared humanity is really a precondition of all other values. In war, this moral imperative is being violated at all stages and for all the participants. Since perpetual war is existentially untenable and peace necessarily the norm, any divergence from the norm requires justification. Preparation for any war on the side of the aggressor, as well as the justification of defense on the side under attack, are, as a rule, in the service of political propaganda which, instead of presenting the situation in rational and realistic terms, aims at arousing passions and lowering the ability for critical thinking in the general populace. By often distorting and abusing historical, economic, or current geo-political facts, the propaganda’s goal is to create a partisan—us v. them mindset that will quash any dissenting opinion and give the party in power a free hand to make decisions on the part of their fellow citizens. So, at its very onset, even before armed conflict has begun, the means of war’s justification is the disrespect for the rationality of the fellow citizens and their autonomy in making critical judgments, until they are eventually reduced to a screaming mob that could easily be manipulated. Once historians, intelligentsia, journalists, and artists, who could have acted as a controlling force, are neutralized by the propaganda, everyone is swept along in the hysteria of warmongering, or at least neutralized enough to ensure their silence. (It is true that in densely populated areas, for thousands of years, inhabited areas such as Europe or the Middle East, where populations mix and rulers change, we do not have to get far into the past to discover past wrongs. However, instead of using these facts as an opportunity for education and mutual atonement, the wrongs that are committed and need to be avenged are always on “our” side.) Once the propaganda manages to mold the perception of the opposing side as an existential threat, the next step is transforming those actively participating in the war into actual killers. Since most humans abhor killing and naturally feel empathy for other humans, in order to weaken the scruples and assuage possible guilt, the purpose of military training is to dehumanize the enemy in the eyes of the trainees, to condition them to overlook the personhood of enemy combatants and see them simply as targets, relying on crude generalizations that presume their guilt and evil intent. The goal of military training is to likewise erase the personhood of those who have enlisted or who have been drafted, turning each soldier into an anonymous part of the collective, a cog in the war machine. The very fact that nation-states usurp the right to conscript their citizens and punish them for defection, sometimes at the point of execution, implies their depersonalization, their treatment as a means. Soldiers who voluntarily join the military are expected, as part of the contract, to give up their autonomy to make personal decisions, agreeing in advance to follow the commands of their superiors, which undercuts their ability to be moral agents in the crucial scenarios where their moral character will be put to the test. Arguing that they are doing so of their own free will diminishes respect for soldiers as rational agents, since depriving oneself of one’s own freedom could hardly be seen as a free rational decision. Depersonalization and dehumanization of all participants is a premise on which common military strategy operates. Planning military operations requires calculating the odds of winning and losing, presenting risks and effects on human lives as the number of possible casualties. Working out the proportionality requirement for a just war is immoral in principle: it is performed from the unjustified position of power over people’s lives on both sides of the conflict, the supremacist position that usurps the authority to decide about other people’s destiny, treating them simply as instruments of achieving the set military goal. It prioritizes the group’s agenda over the value of human lives on both sides of the conflict. Military strategists assign instrumental and numerical value to human lives based on a morbid hierarchy: at the bottom are the lives of enemy combatants treated as liable targets and basically having a negative value, since “eliminating” them is the desired goal. Even though the lives of “our boys” are nominally understood as valuable, they still enter into the calculation only as a number needed to achieve victory, often reduced to sheer cannon fodder. And though military strategy technically aims to avoid casualties among the civilian population, such casualties are often foreseen and discounted as a necessary “collateral damage,” the very formulation revealing the obscenity of such reasoning. While the depersonalization and dehumanization of all participants precedes the armed conflict, once the war campaign actually starts, it brings about the brutalization of the soldiers who are turned into killers and forced to commit atrocities. In combat, most moral concerns are put aside and survival takes priority. Freed from the burden of personal responsibility for their actions in war and operating under the motto “kill or be killed,” soldiers are capable of committing crimes such as causing needless civilian deaths and injuries, engaging in torture, rape, pillaging, destruction of infrastructure, actions they would have never dreamed of committing as civilians, actions they cannot come to terms with once they return to civilian life. After witnessing and most probably committing atrocities and possibly war crimes, after living under conditions where one’s life is constantly under threat, where all the conventions of civilian life are set aside, they have a hard time returning to normalcy. Having once lived and operated on the other side of the moral order, it is difficult for them to achieve a coherent world-view, even if they sincerely believed they fought on the side of good against evil. A common defense strategy is blocking those experiences from awareness, refusing to talk about them, closing them off in some hidden and buried corner of their conscience. Veterans often succumb to addictions, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and other psychiatric conditions; the rate of suicide among them is one of the highest of all social groups. The baggage they bring from the war is a far cry from the myth of a just warrior perpetuated by the propaganda in order to entice young people to enlist, which they do without having the slightest idea of what they are getting themselves into. The war brings about depersonalization and dehumanization not only to soldiers actively engaged in combat but also to noncombatants living in the war zone. When one finds oneself under the conditions of war, where the only goal is survival, one’s being is reduced to one’s own flesh, while all other goals and interests that make us who we are get cast aside. With the exception of a few moral heroes, under the conditions of scarcity, where resources are limited and one’s life depends on obtaining them, solidarity and generosity commonly give way to selfishness, greediness, and aggression. In the territory where the war is fought, the basic conditions of communal life are obliterated. Thomas Hobbes hypothesized about the state of nature that supposedly preceded civil society, where everyone was in a state of war with everyone else, where people’s actions were not guided by any laws nor moral norms, where “the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Although Hobbes was wrong in presenting the state of nature as an actual historical account, he accurately describes life in the state of war. In the territory where the war is fought, the basic fabric of social life is torn apart: electricity, water, and gas supplies are cut off, food stores are empty, schools and offices closed, public transportation is not working, medical offices and hospitals cannot provide health care. People are brought back to the state of nature, each man to himself fighting for survival. (Living under the conditions of war is actually worse than living in the state of nature, since hunter-gatherers could live peacefully in a plentiful natural environment.)
The colonization of territories ignited the first wave of globalization. European sea captains began regular transoceanic travel in the 15th and 16th Centuries for the first time systematically connecting lands and peoples that had been unconnected.[1] The European powers advanced on new lands, subdued them – militarily and politically but also culturally – and began a progressive and uninterrupted process of spoliation. Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, colonization reached new heights with different characteristics and new protagonists, but with the constant objective of extracting wealth from lands and peoples. The nexus of colonial domination and extraction linked, in powerful and enduring ways, European powers to native lands in the Americas, Africa and Asia. The echoes of colonialism live in many of the defining features of economy and society in the former colonialized lands. The peoples subjected in the processes of colonial domination endured cultural, social, political and economic mutations, mostly as a consequence of acts of domination, violence, genocide, and demographic collapse.[2] Forced labor, slavery, territorial displacement and the appropriation of natural resources were commonplace. The commodification of land and labor gave birth to new forms of capitalism based on the violent extraction of profit from humankind and nature. Colonization also meant the replacement of the original social models by exogenous ones, which legitimized domination under various guises and created new axiological paradigms in accordance with their own needs. Supposed racial superiority, civilization and religion were some of the arguments used to consolidate the advance of colonial practices. Psycho-social violence and pseudo-scientific models of anthropological evolution racialized entire human populations as inferior and in need of paternalistic guidance.[3] Native institutions were annihilated and along with them all those ancestral ways of thinking and traditions that preserved a particular balance between human settlements and their natural surroundings. Psychological denigration and debasement of native mentalités became integral tools of domination. The ideas of justice and the common good that existed in those territories prior to the conquest were suppressed and replaced by the “enlightened” ideas of the central powers. To this end, each and every one of the socialization channels was co-opted. Establishment culture and education disparaged pre-existing forms of thought and, under the guise of their barbarism, banished them from the new prevailing thought. The decolonization processes that began with the independence movements of the 19th century and culminated with the last emancipatory events of the mid-20th century, did not lead to a reversal of domination. Although the format changed and the former colonies acquired a new nominal status, in reality spoliation, political subjugation and cultural colonization are still very much alive today. Neocolonialism, which is now twinned with neoliberalism, is thorough and implacable when it comes to consolidating results for global centrality. Today, formerly colonized peripheral countries have the international political status of free regions, but, in most cases, they are subjected to new economic and cultural paradigms of domination. The wealth of the colonizers is a necessary cause and consequence of the poverty of the colonized. In the 21st Century, the human face of neocolonialism are massive inequalities, war and terror and the mass catastrophic migrations from the formerly colonialized territories into the wealthier regions in Europe and North America. As an immigrant from the former colonies in the United Kingdom put it, “we are here, because you were there.”[4] Justice and the common good were and are traversed by these processes of colonization, decolonization and neocolonialism. Viewing the institutions of Africa and America through that historical prism and understanding the current dynamics of domination and subjugation, allows us to shed some light on the contemporary tragedies of hunger, war, catastrophic migrations, displacement and marginalization referenced by Pope Francis in his famous encyclical Laudato Si’. Recently, the Holy Father confirmed his specific concern on the subject, stating that “Many countries of the American continent and an important group of countries of the African continent share a common historical past of spoliation, domination, and control and they have also been brutally subjected to the dictates of the global economy. Both continents have high rates of poverty and unemployment: access to land, shelter and work are pending issues for most of the populations of those nations. It is very important that these hardships find you united in the need for a shared characterization of the current state and judicial role, and in the analysis of external influences in the – not always correct – choice of political and social models”.*
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