Just to pile on here, you'll usually find that people who claim to be pacifists will say, "oh, well, yeah, of course we had to fight Hitler" when confronted. They don't actually even think of themselves that way, in other words.
During the war (to his credit, before the full extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazis were publicly known), Gandhi called on Britons to fight the Nazis without arms, suggesting that the only way to defeat the Nazis with violence was to become more horrible than the Nazis.
Today we have the benefit of hindsight so we can see that was a silly thing to assert, but that hindsight realization should drive us to realize that caution must be exercised when advocating non-violent resistance. It cannot be successfully applied to every situation.
(To Every Briton: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1945851/posts)
[T]here is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity... he believed in ’arousing the world’, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?
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“Hitler,” Gandhi solemnly affirmed, “killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. I believe in hara-kiri. I do not believe in its militaristic connotations, but it is a heroic method.”
“You think,” I said, “that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?”
“Yes,” Gandhi agreed,” that would have been heroism. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to the evils of Hitler’s violence, especially in 1938, before the war. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”
[snip]
Mahatma Gandhi has never lived under a thoroughly totalitarian regime; his generosity and humanity make it difficult for him to realize how very cruel a dictatorship can be. In India, and in Palestine, and other plces, violence or organized nonviolence is a form of “public relations.” …
Thus gandhian nonviolence as well as its ugly opposite — Zionist terror — implies the existence of a free democratic society in England (and in America). It is to this court of public opinion that the resisters in India and kidnappers in Palestine have appealed. But suppose there were no democracy in Western nations?
A British prime minister could not order a million people dragged out of their houses and off the streets to be melted down to soap in fiery furnaces. Hitler could — and did.
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That last section in particular strikes me as quite similar to George Orwell's objection.
(quotation from "Gandhi and Stalin: Two Signs At The World's Crossroads", by way of: http://stevereads.com/weblog/2007/12/10/gandhi-the-jewish-vi...)
I think this was in "End of Faith."
You might argue that even if Germany had been unswayed, the Americans and British would have been. That may be true, but then you are just pushing the task of using violence to stop Hitler onto another party. You haven't eliminated violence, you've just postponed it and had millions of people senselessly kill themselves instead of making the Nazis struggle with the task.
The only way that loosing the support of the uninformed German masses would have stopped the Nazis is if those previously uninformed German masses took up arms against their government. The Nazis were only going to stop killing once there was nobody left to kill, or once they were killed. They played by a different set of rules.
And they needed active support from the "uninformed German masses" - why do you think Goebbels was their 3rd or 4th most important man? The support was gained through propaganda, and the core parts of that were the all-around (including moral) superiority of the Aryan race and in contrast the portrayal of Jews as its absolute enemy, both despicable and threatening.
If that propaganda had been revealed as a lie via large-scale non-violent protests, it would have caused serious and quite possibly unsurmountable problems for the Nazi government - they did not have nearly enough hardened ideologues to run the entire country.
No, I don't think that.
What I think is that are a fine example of people who could not be stopped with anything but violence. Killing or letting them have their way were the only options.
They likely could not have run the country without the support of the German people (I'd like to point out that it is not clear that they could have run the country _even with_ the support of the German people; they were still on a self-destructive trajectory even if they had not been at war with the Allied forces...) but they could have kept the slaughter going. While having an industrialized society does make genocide more efficient, it is by no means a prerequisite for genocide.
The Nazis required propaganda not because they were afraid of what would happen if the German public became peacefully non-cooperative. They needed propaganda to 1) prevent a violent rebellion in Germany and 2) remain strong in the face of violent opposition from the Allied forces.
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Succinctly put:
I do not believe that the Germans were pure monolithic ultimate evil.
I do not believe that this would have been a winning strategy:
"You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them."
Against the Nazis, I believe that is the strategy of a fool.
What is clear is that the German people knew something was afoot. Perhaps they did not know that there were camps build for the express purpose of extermination, but the sure as hell knew there were mass deportations, families being disappeared, and concentration camps (a concept that is distinct from death/extermination camps).
However, when I talked to those granddads, it became very clear that they knew what was going on. They not only had a sharp memory of what happened, but also tried to make their ideology and actions appear harmless. It's always the same story. "I had no idea what was going on. And what could I have done, even if I knew it?"
The stinky story falls apart, when they start explaining how it was back then. After an hour of talk you get the sense that they try to defend something that is simply illogical. Most Germans today, don't agree with any part of the NS-Period, but cannot get rid of their own hate against Jews, colored people or different people. You've recently read this story about the guy who got him self arrested, right? Try to suit up like a Jew, a Black, a Gay or any other enemy of the old regime and you will really understand how it is. On Halloween you can go out as one without looking weird, but even though the setup is artificial, I'm sure you will get reactions that you wouldn't expect and from people from whom you wouldn't expect it.
Once a disabled man knocked our door and asked for a signature. He tried to use sales tactics to get his signature, but when I found out what it was for, which he strongly tried to hide, I was shocked. He blatantly tried to get our votes for their nazi party. That's not a year ago. Of course, I told him to go the f* out of here and that he should read a book, which explains how his own party burned people like him alive, and then think about his political views.
How well did he? He was rotting away in prison when the most important aspects of India and Pakistans independence was negotiated by more pragmatic leaders.
The British decision to grant independence happened at a time when Congress had lost massive amounts of influence due to their stance on the war, and the other parts of the independence movement had used the opportunity to strengthen their positions.
Because he was out of the picture when the most important decisions was made, he lost his chance at preventing the partition, for example.
It's clear he was an important leader, but there were many others.
False.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2511/did-the-nazis-...
(primarily focuses on the lampshade myth, but also touches the issue of soap from human corpses)
yeah, i can totally see how that is impossible.
irony aside, the politics in play at those wars are exactly the same that allowed the nazists socialists to kill people in Europe as well (from the surrendering Jewish to the fighting french)
I don't think that the foreign policy of the Five Eyes is really a relevant tangent at this point in the discussion, but suffice it to say that I am 'Not A Fan'(tm). If you're looking for someone to disagree with there, you'll have to find somebody else.
That kind of comment trivializes what was done in the name of Fascism. Just stop.
There's something to that, but consider the case of Tibet. Ok, China isn't Nazi Germany, but they're pretty totalitarian, particularly in Tibet. They certainly don't allow "a free press and right of assembly." The Dalai Lama, as spiritual and political leader of Tibet, has insisted on Ghandi-style non-violent resistance for over 60 years now. Instead of jumping into the ocean, Tibetans protest the occupation by setting themselves on fire. It happens so often that gasoline is a controlled substance in Tibet.
We might note that non-violence hasn't been very effective against the Chinese, (at least so far) and if that's all Orwell was getting at, fine. On the other hand, I think it's safe to say that the Dalai Lama and his followers do understand the nature of totalitarianism, and it's not just naiveté that makes them continue with non-violence.
To apply an example: If this resistance was trained into the British public, and the Germans marched into London and declared themselves conquerers, the population would ignore them. When they are ordered to build factories here, to report to detention centres there, they would simply refuse to. Threats and demonstrations of force aimed at extracting compliance by brutalising certain segments of the population would be disregarded by the rest of the population[1].
Supplies for the conquerors would go missing or never be produced. They would have to rely on their own manpower to oversee all operations at gunpoint. As soon as the men with guns are called away somewhere else, work stops, workers disappear.
Any population which could respond in this manner would be unconquerable not in terms of territory, but in terms of spirit, which I believe is the sort of thing Ghandi was after.
The degree to which you could ever implement this system is dubious. I'm not sure you could get large groups of people to act that way. But if you could, it would be very effective.
[1] This is the bit I find hardest to see in practise.
That is a very strong component of what Orwell was getting at. What Orwell was further getting at is that the Germans had extermination on their mind, the English in India and even the Chinese in Tibet did not.
Additionally Orwell is pointing out that non-violent resistance is made effective by the existence of free societies anywhere in the world that they might have influence. The Tibetans benefit from this, as you can infer from how much time the Dalai Lama spends courting the international community. Gandhi's suggestion to the British would have led to the eradication of free societies.
Ghandi and the Dalai Lama, on the other hand, have a much broader goal, which, yes, involves lifting oppression, but also includes more subtle aspects of the well-being of their followers once that goal has been achieved. I think that contra Orwell, practitioners of non-violence appeal not only to free societies elsewhere, but also to the humanity of their oppressors. And so they try to eliminate the conflict, rather than winning it. Except... decades later, Tibet is still oppressed by China.
My point is not that Orwell is wrong, but that he misunderstands Ghandi.
A justified violent action is future oriented, hoping that the future will vindicate what will be a past action but knowing that at the moment, the action is "wrong" until it becomes redeemed through historical context.
By contrast, a legitimate violent action is past oriented, and understood as simply "right", because the power carrying it out has been granted legitimate state power. Here, we can see how people in the US who favor military action often see military action as the "right" of the US to protect its interests, coupled with the legitimacy of US power as a force for the promotion of human rights (not a view I agree with, by the way).
This might sound like a strange and useless distinction, but consider the difference between a police officer shooting someone because there is no other action, and doing even though it may be wrong, and on the other hand, a police officer tasing a "non-compliant" suspect because he believes he legitimately has that power and won't be harmed even if, in the future, people decide it was a wrong action.
At that point, it seems useful, at least to me, to understand that we live in an imperfect world and may have to do violent things, but can be strong pacifists by asserting that there is never a "legitimate" violence.
I liked the approach in Iain Banks' Culture series. The Culture believes that war is sometimes necessary but resolutely refuses to glorify it, so all their combat ships are named things like "Thug" and "Gangster" and "Torturer".
And if you really want to go to the definition, wiktionary [1] has it as:
1.One who loves, supports, or favours peace;
one who is pro-peace.
2.One who avoids violence.
3.One who opposes violence and is anti-war.
In my personal opinion, abolishing standing militaries while leaving ourselves open to raising an army if the (perhaps unlikely) need arises is, while probably not a common attitude, still just a standard non-pacifist position. I am more than open to abolishing standing armies, but I do not consider myself to be a pacifist.
That's not so much "pacifism" as it is "being a bog-standard sensible person". Of course standard sensible people like to give themselves all sort of nice sounding labels that they can wear like badges (egalitarian, pacifist, etc); there isn't anything wrong with that.
I guess the take-away here is that people can certainly claim these sorts of things about themselves, evidence to the contrary, but we shouldn't necessarily take them seriously.