Pacifism Research Articles

A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania

A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania

Pacifism and the Blitz, 1940-1941

Pacifism and the Blitz, 1940-1941

The Pacifism of Duane Friesen

The Pacifism of Duane Friesen

Equipment and team work

Before a man can give his best to a cause, he has the right to ask himself why and wherefore? Quite often, the soldier in high places feels a pacifist and why should not a scientist bemoan the need to give his best to produce a weapon.

Feminism and Pacifism: Rosa Mayreder's Writings against War

Feminism and Pacifism: Rosa Mayreder's Writings against War

Conscience, Comrades, and the Cold War: The Korean War Draft Resistance Cases of Socialist Pacifists David McReynolds and Vern Davidson

This article examines the Korean War draft resistance cases of David McReynolds and Vern Davidson and their challenge to the Selective Service Act of 1948, which granted conscientious objection status to religious but not secular objectors. McReynolds and Davidson were active in Los Angeles socialist and pacifist youth circles. In short, this article is about comrades whose secular, socialist pacifist / radical pacifist convictions led them to dissent from and resist the Cold War and Korean War. This article contributes to the scant literature on conscientious objection and draft resistance during the Korean War. It also provides new evidence to substantiate the “long sixties” thesis that locates the origins of the sixties in the 1950s, or earlier, and argues that the fifties contained radical dissident elements, including a little‐known socialist pacifist current, that resisted the dominant culture and provided a seedbed for social and legal change in the sixties and seventies.

Creating Necessity

Creating Necessity:Well-Used Violence in the Thought of Machiavelli Dustin Ells Howes (bio) Vettius Messius said to his soldiers: "Follow me. There is neither wall nor rampart in the way, but just armed forces to oppose armed forces. In valour we are equal, but in necessity which is the last weapon and best of all, you have the advantage." —Machiavelli, The Discourses on Livy (III:12) In his State of the Union address in January 2003, President George W. Bush made the case for invading Iraq, even if the United Nations failed to approve military action. Offering a personal pledge, he remarked "Whatever action is required, whenever action is necessary, I will defend the freedom and security of the American people" (Bush 2003). On the fifth year anniversary of the Iraq War, he addressed critics of the war in a speech at the Pentagon by saying the "costs are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies," and ended the speech with the remark: "The battle in Iraq is noble; it is necessary; and it is just" (Bush 2008). When Barack Obama was elected later that year, it was in part due to his early opposition to the war and his pledge to withdraw from Iraq. However, in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, he affirmed the principle of necessity. Expressing admiration for Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he averred that sometimes force is unfortunately required. Using the examples of Hitler and al Qaeda, he said: "Evil does exist in the world....To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason." For this reason, "I—like any head of state—reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation" (Obama 2009). A few thinkers, namely radical pacifists, have argued that violence is never necessary or justified. Some politicians and ideological movements, fascists most prominently in contemporary politics, have argued violence is [End Page 183] good in its own right and therefore needs no justification. However, most contemporary politicians and modern political theorists forward the idea that violence is necessary. As the disagreement between President Bush and President Obama regarding the war in Iraq demonstrates, this pragmatic claim tells us little about when and what kind of violence is unavoidable. Those subjected to violence, whether individuals or states, usually do not agree with the assessment that violence inflicted upon them is necessary (although they often respond by arguing violence is the necessary response). Some of the disputes between luminaries of modern political thought can be viewed through this lens. Hobbes, Locke and Marx, for instance, each claim that violence is necessary, but what they think must be achieved through violence differs (e.g. to overawe dissenters, defend one's property, or end capitalism). What, then, does the idea that violence is necessary mean? Why does violence seem necessary to some but not others in particular circumstances? The work of Machiavelli provides some clues. A number of scholars have noticed that in Machiavelli, necessità "is not just a hostile force [but] may create opportunities" (Gilbert 1965). Victoria Kahn writes that Machiavelli's invocation of the verità effettuale, or the "effectual truth," implies that "one does not simply imitate necessity but that one can manipulate it—effect it—to one's own advantage" (1993, 211). Claude Lefort says that for Machiavelli "the political art derives from the knowledge of necessity—a knowledge guided by the examination of extreme situations" (2000, 122). Vickie Sullivan writes that when Machiavelli describes necessity he "attempts, as far as possible, to make human beings its source" (1996, 181). These commentators set us on the trail of answers to the above questions that undermine some of our basic assumptions about necessity. Machiavelli suggests that trying to determine when violence is necessary or not misses the ways in which our very impressions of what is necessary are linked to how violence is practiced. Extant scholarship offers a wide variety of opinions on Machiavelli's understanding of the proper role of violence in politics. Sheldon Wolin argues that Machiavelli counsels us...

World War II Resisters: Creating Communities of Resistance in Prison

World War II war resisters—those men who actively refused to register for the draft because it violated their principles, whether political, moral, religious, or otherwise—aggressively challenged the limits of freedom in American society by rejecting military service because they believed that killing, under any pretense, was always wrong. As a maximum protest against war, resisters refused conscription, thus violating the draft law, which resulted in their imprisonment. Paradoxically, resisters found the prison to be a site of virtue as they rejected mandatory enlistment as a citizen’s duty. Resisters turned the prison into a forum for the development of political thought and action regarding radical pacifism and nonviolence. Through direct action, prisoners realized the potential of nonviolent resistance, a method and technique they cultivated before the war, mastered in prison, and carried with them after the war to champion civil rights, racial equality, and peace in subsequent conflicts.

A New Anarchism Emerges, 1940-1954

A New Anarchism Emerges, 1940-1954 Andrew Cornell U.S. historians and political scientists writing in the 1970s explained that anarchism, as an organized political movement, had died on the battlefields of Spain, only to spring up once again, unexpectedly, in the wake of the 1968 uprisings in Paris.1 In a similar vein, Jonathon Purkis and James Bowen have recently suggested that those trying to make sense of contemporary anarchist initiatives would do well to recognize 1968 as the jumping off point for a "paradigm shift" in anarchist politics: "[T]he events in France and beyond seemed to act as a lens for a number of emerging movements which, in addition to existing official anarchist movements, have given anarchism a new lease on life." They suggest that "the logic of many of these discourses only realized their potential in the late 1990s."2 Certainly, to take the case of the United States, anarchism was at a low point—perhaps the lowest since its inception—from the onset of World War II in 1939 until the mid-1960s, if judged by numbers of participants, organizations, and activities. Yet this picture neglects the continuous existence of anarchist periodicals and initiatives across that twenty-five-year period. Although anarchism was a tiny and marginal political current during the 1940s and 1950s, it was not at all static. Rather, anarchists spent these years developing new political analyses, strategies, and aesthetics that fundamentally shaped the forms anarchism took when it again gained [End Page 105] wider currency in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Moreover, 1940s and 1950s anarchism influenced the civil rights movement, the 1960s counterculture, the New Left, and the women's liberation movement in ways that historians have yet to fully understand or acknowledge. During and after World War II, theorists drew on recent developments in social theory to broaden the anarchist critique of power beyond the movement's traditional focus on class oppression. At the same time, they learned new techniques and conceptions of resistance from groups of radical pacifists with whom they collaborated. From this milieu arose a conception of anarchism indebted to Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy that advocated individuals focusing on living their own lives in a fashion that resembled their ideals as closely as possible. These "practical anarchists" sought to prefigure the world they hoped to live in rather than wait until after a revolution that now seemed impossibly far off.3 It was this new style of anarchism—not the classic variety that obtained before the war—that would most directly inform and inspire the movements of the 1960s. As anarchist ideas contributed to mid-century pacifism, the debates of the "New York Intellectuals," and the nascent counterculture, these influences, in turn, shifted anarchism toward a middle-class constituency and promoted personal lifestyle change as a strategic priority. Anarchists The outbreak of World War II delivered a sharp blow to the small anarchist movement left in the United States at the end of the 1930s. Since 1933, the International Group of San Francisco, publishers of the monthly newspaper Man!, had promoted a form of insurrectionary anarchism that eschewed formal organizations and encouraged spontaneous uprisings of the oppressed. In 1939, Man! was forced to cease publication when its editor, Marcus Graham, and publisher, Vincenzo Ferrero, went underground to avoid the jail time and deportation threatened by federal agents as a means of suppressing their outspokenly antiwar paper. The New York City based Vanguard Group, which had advocated a syndicalist strategy of building revolutionary trade unions throughout the decade, also produced the last issue of its journal, Vanguard: A Journal of Libertarian Communism, in 1939.4 The group suffered [End Page 106] from personal feuds, disagreements over how to relate to the coming war, and hearts broken from the defeat of their comrades in the Spanish Civil War. However, beginning in 1934 the Vanguard Group had helped anarchist teenagers in Brooklyn and the Bronx (many of them children of anarchists involved with the Yiddish newspaper Freie Arbeiter Shtimme) launch youth study groups. A number of these Vanguard Juniors would play important roles in sustaining and transforming the anarchist movement in the 1940s. In 1942, Audrey Goodfriend...

Are Pacifists Cowards?

Are Pacifists Cowards?

Are Pacifists Cowards

Are Pacifists Cowards

Army GI, Pacifist CO

Army GI, Pacifist CO

John Brown, Quietist

In common usage, quietism is often conflated with passivity, and pacifism is often equated with quietism. As a result, pacifism has often been confused with passivity. In the antebellum United States, John Brown and other militant abolitionists who endorsed the use of violent antislavery tactics criticized nonviolent reformers like William Lloyd Garrison as men of words instead of men of action. Garrison and his allies rejected the equation of their pacifism with quietism, but the charge that Garrisonian abolitionists were more passive than Brown still survives. In fact, the most recent scholarship on John Brown has tended to reinforce Brown's own division of the movement into active reformers like himself and less radical pacifists like Garrison. In this article, McDaniel challenges this polarized view of the abolitionist movement, which is partly the product of the common polarization of quietism and activism. He shows that both Garrison and Brown were complex icons, neither of whom can be easily categorized as a quietist or activist. A careful look at the antislavery movement suggests, therefore, that pacifism and quietism are not synonymous. Moreover, a careful look at Brown suggests that quietism and activism are not antonyms. On some definitions of quietism, McDaniel argues, even a violent activist like Brown can exhibit quietistic aspects. This article therefore challenges, as well, the common connotation of quietism as inaction.

Leo Tolstoy on Peace and War

“War always interested me,” wrote the twenty-three-year-old Leo Tolstoy in “the raid” (1853), an early story inspired by his personal experience of a brutal border skirmish in the Caucasus. “Not war in the sense of maneuvers devised by great generals … but the reality of war, the actual killing” (1). The focus of Tolstoy's interest here remained absolute throughout his long and brilliantly inconsistent life. As a second lieutenant during the Crimean War in 1854–55, he wrote three “Sevastopol Stories” about that city under siege, which were so cannily constructed and voiced that the new tsar, Alexander II, deeply touched, decreed that they be translated into French so that Russian courage would reach a European audience—whereas other readers took these tales as critical of the imperial war effort, even as subversive. Tolstoy revealed his own chauvinist side in the mid-1860s while writing the final books of War and Peace. Napoléon was a caricature from the start, of course, but, in a rising arc of patriotic disdain, Tolstoy proceeded to ridicule almost every alien nation's soldiers, generals, and tacticians; only simple Russian peasants, partisans, Field Marshal Kutuzov, and the occasional clear-seeing field commander were exempt from the author's scorn. By the end of his life, Tolstoy professed radical Christian anarchism and pacifism, preaching nonviolent resistance to evil and urging young men to oppose the military draft. But he never lost his fascination with close-up “actual killing.” The greatest literary achievement of Tolstoy's final decade, the Caucasus novel Hadji Murad, ends with such graphic slaughter, so many grotesque hackings and mutilations, and even the beheading of the hero described at such epic leisure that it is difficult to believe Tolstoy ever doubted the veracity of languages of violence.

Takeo Arishima, pacifism and anti-nationalism

Takeo Arishima, pacifism and anti-nationalism

Women's Struggles within the American Radical Pacifist Movement

AbstractPacifism and peace activism are often stereotyped as the domains of nurturing women acting upon their maternal instincts to end war and thus protect the children of the world. Exploring the history of female radical pacifists with a focus on gender, however, reveals a much more complex set of dynamics that mirrored cultural forces pervading society at large. Their language was not always that of motherhood. From the 1940s through the 1970s, women also used the rhetoric and symbols of ‘brotherhood’ and ‘sisterhood’ to frame and justify their pacifist protests. Nor was their activism always celebrated. Instead, whether as ‘brothers’, ‘mothers’, or ‘sisters’, women who acted on the front lines of struggle repeatedly confronted a political culture that celebrated male heroism and masculine militancy, and cast women in secondary supporting roles. In critical ways, the culture of the peace movement thus mirrored the gender dynamics of the very culture of militarism it sought to undermine.

America’s Coming of Age: Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought

America’s Coming of AgeDaniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought Merritt Roe Smith (bio) According to Daniel Walker Howe, the three decades between the end of the War of 1812 and the end of the Mexican War (1848) witnessed “the transformation of America.”1 Of what did this transformation consist? What drove it? What were its larger implications? These questions lie at the very center of historical writing about the early and middle decades of nineteenth- century America. Howe’s monumental effort goes far in answering them. In the process, he upends several well-known interpretations of the so-called Jacksonian period. Howe knits together a complex tapestry of seemingly unrelated historical events with keen insight and wonderfully lucid prose. His intermittent snapshots of American society between 1815 and 1848 are well done, as are his depictions of American science and literature. Of greater significance, however, are the connections he establishes between evangelical religion, social reform, sectional politics, and economic development as key elements in America’s transformation. His discussion of the Second Great Awakening, with its focus on revival-oriented Protestant preachers like Charles Grandison Finney and Lyman Beecher (the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is extremely well done. Owing to the efforts of Finney, Beecher, and other “New Light” evangelists, the Second Great Awakening became a major force that not only ignited widespread millennial fervor in America but also spawned numerous voluntary associations calling for the reformation of society in preparation for the second coming of the Christ. Among these associations numbered temperance, missionary, Bible distribution, and pacifist groups as well as the most important of all, the abolitionist movement aimed at ridding the country of slavery. What is [End Page 187] more, white middle-class women joined these movements and, through their experiences, came to the realization that their rights needed to be legally recognized. Some of Howe’s best writing centers on the rise of the women’s rights movement and its association with abolitionism. Equally interesting is his discussion of how evangelical revival methods influenced politics, resulting most notably in the “political revivalism” that characterized William Henry Harrison’s successful campaign for the presidency in 1840 (p. 573). Howe’s chapters on Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party, and the socalled “second party system” that emerged during the 1830s are particularly telling. Howe is no admirer of Jackson. Rather than applauding him as a national hero and “man of the people,” he portrays “Old Hickory” as a selfabsorbed white supremacist with “profoundly authoritarian instincts”—definitely “not a man to be crossed” (p. 328). Particularly noteworthy are Howe’s observations on Indian removal, a brutal process that he describes as a form of ethnic cleansing (pp. 423, 810). “The fundamental impulse behind Jacksonian Democracy,” he emphasizes, “was about the extension of white supremacy across the North American continent,” adding that “Indian policy, not banking or the tariff, was the number one issue . . . during the early years of Jackson’s presidency” (pp. 356–57). Jacksonian America was many things, but it was not essentially democratic. To be sure, the franchise expanded during the period, but only for white men. Indians, free blacks, undesirable immigrants, and women were systematically excluded from citizenship, to say nothing of the terrible plight of slaves. An unswerving commitment to America’s “Manifest Destiny” and the protection of slavery accordingly became central tenets of Jacksonian Democracy (p. 524). Contrasted with his critical view of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party, Howe portrays the Whig Party as a force for innovation and change in antebellum America. If Andrew Jackson and his successors Martin Van Buren and James K. Polk are the villains of his story, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay are its heroes. Indeed, Howe dedicates What Hath God Wrought “to the memory of John Quincy Adams ”! While neither Adams nor Clay succeeded in garnering the degree of public adulation and support that Jackson did, their visionary ideas about American advancement provided a blueprint for transforming rural America into a modern urban-industrial nation. In Howe’s view, Adams and Clay were “improvers” who resisted Jackson’s expansionist policies, including the expansion of slavery. They...

Pacifism and English Literature: Minstrels of Peace by R. S. White

MLR, 104.3, 2009 835 clique, and his Supposes and Jocasta, a collaboration with Francis Kinwelmershe, Gascoigne was fully engaged in the politicised literarymilieu of the Inns of Court [...] creating a literary reputation forhimself atGrays [... ] and further raising his profile' (p. 62). But these highly successful years ofGascoigne's career are promptly overshadowed by his overspending and careless attention tofinances, resulting inhis imprisonment fordebt in 1570, an experience which, as Austen shows, encouraged his search forpatronage and advancement. In Chapter 3Austen looks at the year 1575, which is conventionally accepted as the point when Gascoigne's career finally turned, 'marking his moral reformation and repentance ofhis profligateways' (p. 84). He had recently returned from thewars inHolland, and Austen details how he developed his new persona of theReformed Prodigal diplomatically and strategicallywhile also seeking out courtly opportuni ties. This chapter looks closely at the language of certain revisions Gascoigne made tohis printed works and the consequent reaction fromhis audience. In the final chapter Austen examines the Grief of Joy,a manuscript Gascoigne prepared for theQueen as a New Year gift in 1577. This text, the last of his literary productions, is characterized by Gascoigne's new-found confidence in theQueen's favour: 'Themanuscript is a complex document which carries other motifs chosen to remind Elizabeth ofGascoigne's work and his courtly profile' (p. 200). Gascoigne appealed to the Queen to be named laureate but Austen finds his language too bold and places his poetic ambition beyond seeking Elizabeth's approval. His last attempts forpatronage from theQueen reveal that even at the end of his career he struggled to be taken seriously as a reformed figure despite praise forhis literary achievements. Austen's study reveals the close attention inher research to the textual evidence in records, printed editions, marginal notes, and prefatorymaterials that has contributed toherwide-ranging and comprehensive studyofGascoigne's literary career. Newcastle University Allyna E. Ward Pacifism and English Literature:Minstrels ofPeace. By R. S.White. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008. viii+299 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-230-55317-0. R. S. White offers a study in literaryhistory but also a contribution to theburgeoning academic discipline of Peace Studies', now a respectable field of research and study' (pp. 1,4). In his second chapter he compares two poetry anthologies, from 1915 and 1993? to show how the civilian has come to replace the soldier as the focus for ideas about war. Another ofWhite's themes is the distinction between adversarial anti war' poetry and an intrinsic "poetry of peace'" (p. 20). He cites Denise Levertov's 'Making Peace': Levertov's hope fora radically differentpoetry of peace remains an inveiglinghope and a lure towards a future where war isconsidered tobe against thegrain ofnormal human activities and part of thenatural law guaranteeing thepreservation of life. (p. 20) (The sentence goes awry at the end, saying the opposite ofwhat is meant.) 836 Reviews The best of the book is in Part i, a historical survey of 'Pacifist Perspectives'. A chapter on 'Sacred Texts' summarizes pacifist elements inChristianity, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The 'justwar' doctrine is rejected, since to a pacifist no war is just (pp. 3-4). There follows a chapter on 'Humanist Paci fism', covering Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Erasmus, Swift,Thoreau, Morris, Kropotkin, Shaw, Read, Einstein, Freud, Huxley, Dick Sheppard and the Peace Pledge Union ('War is a crime against humanity', p. 69), and ending with Bertrand Russell ('Either man will abolish war, orwar will abolish man', p. 74). A thought-provoking section on 'economic pacifism' argues that: 'Iffed comprehensive statistical data and long term information, neutral computers could surely and irrefutablyprove in an instant thatwar isfinancially disastrous for thevastmajority ofpopulations, whether on the winning or losing side' (p. 77). White's indignation and enthusiasm can be invigorating. However, he several times disarmingly admits that 'In dealing with such a vast subject, the dangers of superficiality of treatment are real' (p. 3). His diffidence is unfortunately justified, particularly in the longwordy paragraphs of Part 11,inwhich he explicates literary works from themedieval, Renaissance, Romantic, andmodern periods. His decision to treat not only strictlypacifist writing, but also any texts deploring the horrors ofwar, turns the book at times into an anthology ofmiscellaneous...

Radical Pacifism in Modern America: Egalitarianism and Protest - by Marian Mollin

Radical Pacifism in Modern America: Egalitarianism and Protest - by Marian Mollin

Nuclear Imperialism and the Pan-African Struggle for Peace and Freedom: Ghana, 1959–19621

What is often missing from historical reflections on Pan-Africanism, African nationalism, and movements for independence is the relationship between struggles for the liberation of the continent from colonial rule and pacifist movements in opposition to nuclear armament. This article reconstructs the struggle against “nuclear imperialism” that emerged out of the Pan-African struggle for freedom in the late 1950s and early 1960s through the important work of radical pacifists Bayard Rustin and Bill Sutherland. Based upon a broad range of sources—published and archival—it revisits the dramatic attempt by peace activists to travel from newly independent Ghana to a site in the Sahara desert where the French intended to test their atomic bomb. The movement against nuclear imperialism that took root in the Pan-African freedom struggle not only showcases the “global” and the “transnational” in ways that need to be recovered, but stands as a counter-narrative, a corrective, to the afro-pessimism that has so dominated scholarship on Africa since the 1980s.