Ask Lemmy

My understanding of history and pacifists, (which may or not be right), is that no pacifist movement has ever "won" a revolution by peaceful means themselves. It always takes a group of people who are willing to use violence and die in the process if need be to achieve the desired ends to back the pacifists up.

Popular modern peaceful movements led by people such as Martin Luther King in the US and Ghandi in colonial India were parallel backed by violent groups such as the Black Panthers in the US and a bunch of small and very active violent groups in India.

And the only reason we know and remember Ghandi and King and hold them up as shining examples of pacifism, is because the powers that be decided it was easier and more beneficial to negotiate with them rather than the more violent factions. After all, that could get you killed outright trying to negotiate with the violent leaders or at least totally ousted from power at best. Dealing with the pacifists was a good way to stay alive and maintain at least some power if not all of it. But until those in power are convinced they can die because enough of the population is actively trying to kill them, they don't much care about talking to the pacifists. I mean, what are they going to do? Carry signs and march for a few days? Oh! The horror! If that worked, Trump would be in jail by now.

Until enough of the populace is angry enough to take up arms and risk death to kill those evil people in power, nothing will change. There will be no reason to make deals or vacate the power for the pacifists to occupy.

But there still remains the problem of the violent people the pacifists now need to deal with. And those people have the taste of blood. This is the weak point in any revolution.....

strong disagree that it is pro-fascist.

Even insects wage war amongst themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_ants

If something with a brain made of a handful of cells wages war, well...

Yeah. There‘s two kinds of people that need to be dealt with in a revolution. The ones that need to be removed, like the corrupt leadership, and the people telling the revolutionaries to stop because “we need to stop the violence and have peace” or whatever.

The former is obvious. The latter because they want to reestablish existing systems because they benefit from them. To dismantle them would be to harm their status. So you wind up basically letting “bygones be bygones” and just sweeping the corruption that cause all the problems under the rug in the name of peace while it continues quietly in the background. Nothing changes except the surface level view, the shitty people just try to stay below the radar.

So yeah, the “pacifists” are often just as bad, not because they’re actually against harming the corrupt people in the regime, but because they’re against harming their comfort zone. They’re protecting the status quo.

So, conditionally, I am against pacifism.

My thoughts when I read this question is that there are so many degrees of pacifism and so many degrees of being for or against something, "being against pacifism" is a meaninglessly binary concept. I mean, to some people pacifism means not being aggressive, while others reject all forms of violence and won't hit back no matter how much they get hit. Orwell was specifically addressing how to deal with nazi Germany in the lead-up to WWII, not to pacifism as a peaceful attitude in general. Which pacifism are you talking about?

On social media complexity always gets reduced to swiping left/right or voting up/down. This very stark and false oversimplification, mostly for the sake of thinking less and scrolling faster, has trained us to reduce every issue to a 100% right side and a million % wrong one. Perfect good vs utter evil. Let's not keep doing that.

pacifism <> anti-militarist <> non-violence

However depending on how you define those, you may recognize in each one. If we rely on a legal definition, militarism and war are only link to states. Armed force without state are not an army, and armed conflicts no declared by states are not war. Dumb lex, sed lex

For exemple, in this definition revolution is not a war, so pacifist could took part in armed force independent from states. That explain why their is a pacifist tradition in communism ... except when those revolution succeed ... well you should leave that armed force that became an army and refuse conscription.

This debate occurred recently through the essay "How Nonviolence Protects the State", which address the non-violence and/or pacifism as exploiters : if you don't want to use violence, other will have to The essay do not get rid of the ideal of non-violence, only what individual position do to people that could not choose.

Now their is an Elephant in the room : police. A violent armed force, acting for a state but without a declaration of war. So from our first definition, we could be a pacifist and let the cops do the exact same thing that an army.

Ulterior motives, awful people, something to that effect. I am personally not pacifist, but if someone wants to be pacifist, I understand.

I don't think violence is a good way to solve problems is why I'm a pacifist. I do believe that people have a right to self defense, and using violence to coerce is morally wrong.

That is a dilemma, then you've got ends and means to contend with and the question of intervention.

My pacifist grandfather served in the US army medical Corp in both WW2 and Korea. He saw some of the worst aspects of both of those conflicts, particularly Korea. I don't think anyone would think that he was helping the Nazis by treating the wounded.

Ultimately, pacifism isn’t about choosing to reject violence, it’s about choosing who is an acceptable target of the violence and the choice is made to appear as a non-choice by failing to categorize state violence as violence because you are not the current target of that violence. How many of the powerless should die to save the powerful from any consequences? I don’t think utilitarianism always makes the most sense, but I think this is a case where the math and morality should make it clear why this is a deeply flawed way of thinking.

Pacifism, like democracy and capitalism, are functional only if everyone participate in them in good faith. There was never in human history a group of people where everyone participated in something in good faith.

What are your thoughts on people who are against pacifism?

It's an elaborate and well-organized psyop by fascists/the very wealthy to bait people to the left of the far-right into promoting violent action, thus successfully smearing their cause/ideology/person as being both violent and extremist, and making it easy for the fascists in power to label, monitor, silence, jail, or kill them. AI is being used to facilitate this.

Imo the worst pacifists are those that want to prevent others from being able to defend themselves.

If you're going to be beat up and you chose to not attempt to defend yourself in any way, then I'll think that you're being stupid, but ultimately it's your life, your choice.

But if someone else is going to be beat up, and you try to make sure that they won't be able to defend themselves, then that makes you an accessory to the assault in my eyes.

A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a "willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual hon- esty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual's point of view is really dangerous" (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a vir- ulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.

m. parenti from blackshirts and reds

Nonsense, who was against Gandhi MLK Mandela? At the same time, MLK never undercut Malcom X, the pacifist and the warrior can work together, they each have their role.

I want peace, and surrender is not peace.

This is something I’ve wanted to write into a character in a fictitious world, but one that’s not even openly in foreign war.

He insists that people need to peacefully understand each other, rather than run lives by settling conflicts with bullets and bombs; he staunchly believes that war is the most horrible thing ever. But a second character points out to him, oppression delivers much of the same circumstance as war in a state of permanence. At least violence can lead to change. The summary quote being just “Everyone is at war.”

If you keep on caving in to bullies, one day, they'll take everything from you.

Look, as a programmer I'm lazy. And I've worked a lot of extra hours due to that laziness, to automate stuff and have less work to do in the future.

It's the same with pacifism. If you want peace, sometimes you have first to use extreme violence to eradicate the bastards that don't.

First murder all fascists, billionaires, and similar threats to peace. And educate the young so they won't become threats to peace again.

Then we can have peace.

You want at least a stick large enough to hit back or scare away aggressors. I agree that a no war world would be best, but that can be achieved by mutual disarment, not by one sided pacifism.

No neutral on a moving train.

Pacifists are selfish, evil, and often hypocritical. I find most modern "pacifists" have no issue with wielding violence, or supporting violence as long as that violence is abstracted to a third party such as the state while constantly deriding people who wish to defend themselves and loved ones from state violence.

Truth is these pacifists would happily see us in camps as long as they get to keep their smug attitudes, and platitudes while avoiding getting their hands directly bloody.

In the end pacifists always implicitly support the status quo.

You can't oversimplify the world in to "our side" and "their side," and say "if you're not with us, you're against us." There are countless different sides and there are factions within those sides that have different motivations and agendas. That's simply a fact, and to pretend otherwise is just lazy.

Pacifists are generally more correct than most people because they've figured out the "no war" part of "no war but class war," and the vast majority of war is not class war (or is perpetrated by the ruling class). I'm not a pacifist but I have respect for those who are.

To be fair, Orwell's argument is understandable in the specific context of WWII, but it is not a generalizable principle.

George Orwell risked his life to travel to a different country and fight alongside the anarcho-communists there. I'm gonna agree with George on this one, he's got the street cred to back it up.

There are many definitions of pacifism, and without further context to simply say someone is a pacifist automatically makes them a fascist is a pretty myopic point of view.

I am anti-war, and I prefer peaceful resolution over violence. By definition I am a pacifist. But, that does not mean I will let someone simply walk all over me or my loved ones without opposition. It doesn’t mean I will simply resort to violence either.

The world is a complicated place, and to treat everything as if it’s an “either, or” situation does everyone a disservice and only feeds into the overall problem.

Refusing to defend yourself is a matter of choice and I have no moral issue with you taking an ass kicking without fighting back if you so choose. Refusing to defend innocents when you are capable, though, is morally reprehensible and makes you a culpable as the one attacking the other. While you're taking your ass kicking, pacifists, I'll be there doing what I can to prevent it from happening and making your attacker regret it.