Pacifism may be comfortable and alluring, but it also a dangerous fantasy. If we want to remain peaceful we should remember our forefathers and remain vigilant against those aiming to do us harm.
This week sees remembrance day where we commemorate all those who lost their lives during the wars of the last century; wars responsible for devastation and suffering on a scale not seen before or since.
It is completely rational to see warfare itself as the cause of all this suffering. After all if we don’t fight, we don’t die. This is pacifism’s allure and is represented by the white poppy drive by the peace pledge union. The mission behind the white poppy is stated on their website:
The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts and embodies values that reject killing fellow human beings for whatever reason.
While this is wholly agreeable, it is a dangerous fantasy. By removing all possibility of us resorting to the ultimate escalation we in fact make it more likely. We inadvertently encourage expansionism and undermine peaceful institutions by removing their back-stop. Instead of preventing war at all costs, we must aim to prevent aggression – pacifism wholly fails to ensure this.
This is not to glorify war of course. No-one wants war, no-one wants to inflict the pain and suffering inevitably associated with it. Nor is it to make light of war, quite the opposite. The vast majority of us today cannot possibly appreciate the horrors of war and we will do whatever we can to reasonably avoid it.
We all want peace but pacifism doesn’t assure it. All it does is lower our defences, lower our resolve and makes us an easier target for those wanting to do us harm. It is a fantasy to believe everyone in the world shares our pacifist world-view and those who don’t will look for any sign of weakness to exploit it. It has forever been thus.
Peace in our time?
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Pacifists have not always held the moral high ground – those around in the 30s have a lot to answer for
Pacifism’s effect may seem paradoxical, but it’s not unprecedented. We have been here before. The First World War was supposed to be the “war to end all wars”. We were never supposed to go to war again. We set up the League of Nations as a peaceful forum for conflict resolution to remove the need for war.
Of course this didn’t turn out to be the case. Our pacifist appeasement policy rendered the League of Nations entirely useless and its decrees were violated by Italy, Japan and later Germany. Our weakness didn’t go unnoticed.
Small violations became large ones and eventually led to violations of entire countries’ sovereignty in the case of Czechoslovakia’s annexation in 1938.
Our pacifism achieved nothing. It only ensured greater eventual suffering.
All we succeeded in doing was encouraging those who wanted to do us harm and allowed them to build their strength without us taking action until, tragically, it was too late. The pacifists of the 1930s have a lot to answer for.
As true now as it was then
Nothing has happened in the intervening years to change this rationale. We have been tremendously successful in avoiding major conflict in Europe since 1945 but this is not due to pacifism, it’s a result of steadfast alliances and a willingness to meet aggression with resolution.
It is not the peaceful EU that has kept Europe safe but the defensive NATO alliance. It was NATO that kept Russia at bay throughout the Cold War, not the UN nor the EU.
It should be no surprise that the country that has recently suffered Russian aggression in recent years has close links with the EU but is not a member of NATO – Ukraine.
Events there render the view that the EU is a great insurer of peace a bad joke. It was the decision of the country’s government to create greater ties with the EU over Russia that acted as the catalyst to the annexation of Crimea in the first place. The EU simply looked on and rung its hands.
Were Ukraine a member of NATO things would have been different.
In Bosnia and Kosovo it was NATO that acted to remove Milosevic and bring his aggressive ambitions to an end, not the UN or EU. Tony Blair may be the “politician that mustn’t be named” here in the UK but in Kosovo he’s a hero and not for his negotiating skills. When interviewed by the Guardian in 2014 a survivor recalls his joy at NATO’s involvement:
“If NATO hadn’t intervened, none of us would be here… people were put in basements and executed. NATO came and that’s why people survived.”
The survivor’s grandson’s name? Tony Blair.
An act of resolution there saved countless lives while pacifists looked the other way.
War is not necessary, military resolution is
Of course, military conflict is not always the answer. Our adventurism in the Middle East has done much to create the environment for ISIS to flourish and inflict tremendous hardship on those in the region. This has brought shame on the West and rightly so.
Disproportionate Israeli military action in Gaza and the West Bank has helped make reconciliation next to impossible. In Northern Ireland too it wasn’t UK military presence that brought about peace, rather deft and resolute negotiation.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this was simply a case of giving peace a chance however.
Had violence been shown to bear fruit for the IRA there would be no Good Friday Agreement. Their aggression had to stop as a precondition for negotiation and so it was stopped. It was not pacifism that won the day, again it was steadfast resolution reinforcing active negotiation.
So it is not that military conflict that guarantees peace, it’s vigilant and resolute policing of aggressive actions that does.
Pacifism isn’t moral
Not only is pacifism shown to be ineffectual as a world-view, it has a corrosive effect on public discourse and social morality as well.
It makes otherwise good people say and do immoral things.
Seumas Milne justifying Russian military aggression on Russia Today
Instead of viewing the world as it is and coming up with strategies for reducing aggression, the pacifist world view takes a pre-defined principle manifestly at odds with history – that war is always avoidable – and works backwards to justify reality to fit with it.
If war is always avoidable then those pursuing violent strategies must be pushed beyond acceptable limits and acting purely out of desperation against some oppression. They must be victims, not perpetrators.
Suddenly the IRA are freedom fighters, not terrorists. Russia is not an aggressive, tyrannical regime but a normalised sovereign nation responding to Western provocation. ISIS is a result of western foreign policy, not a barbaric cult.
This is not confined to a crack pot sect. Instead of celebrating the Kosovo intervention, Jeremy Corbyn in 2004 actually signed a motion in parliament applauding a flawed “expose” by John Pilger that genocide
“Never really happened in Kosovo”
He invited Hezbollah and Hamas into Parliament and praised the IRA, as did his Shadow Chancellor. His new spin doctor Seumas Milne wrote 2 days after 9/11 that Americans “can’t see why they’re hated”, played down the killing of Lee Rigby and went so far as to attempt to defend Stalin’s purges.
To think these people are moral individuals is an atrocious violation of the word.
They don’t have principles other than pacifism. Everything must fit with this, no matter how the world really is.
Let’s remember the real lessons
So this week let’s remember to see the world without the rose tinted spectacles. If we are to remember the fallen properly we should remember that their sacrifice was not in vain. It has led to a better world.
Sure, we must learn the lessons of the past and the Chilcott inquiry into the Iraq War to be published next year is important to that process.
People are out there to do us harm and will take advantage of our weakness, military, economic or societal. They will continue to exist and we must always remain vigilant. We must always be prepared to defend ourselves, our allies and the oppressed using whatever means necessary.
To shirk our responsibilities and fall back on the comfortable pacifist world-view would be naïve, ignorant of history, immoral and wrong.
It would be a dereliction of our fallen forefathers’ memory.
“If you want peace, prepare for war” – Vegetius
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