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| Peace and pacifism writings | |
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| Topic Started: Sep 8 2008, 09:28 PM (86 Views) | |
| Anne Brunner | Sep 8 2008, 09:28 PM Post #1 |
"Special"
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The first is an Interview with Alfred Hessler from Fellowship of Reconciliation. An Aspiration, Not an Achievement An Interview with Alfred Hassler Alfred Hassler (1910-1991) was one of the major figures in FOR. Imprisoned during Wolrd War II as a conscientious objector, he joined the FOR staff and went on to serve as editor of Fellowship magazine and later as an executive secretary for FOR and general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. He was interviewed on hi retirement in 1974 by Jim Forest, editor of Fellowship, and Diane Leonetti, associate editor (Fellowship, September 1974). LEONETTI: Al, perhaps you should start by trying to remember how you became a pacifist. HASSLER: It was during the Depression. Everybody was aware that war was coming. In the summer of 1939 I was teaching a course on Christianity and peace at a Baptist summer conference in western Pennsylvania. The war was so imminent that I recall telling the class that we might not ever see one another again. Somewhere in that period, my thinking turned from antiwar to pacifism. I can't tell just when. My thinking evolved. I never read anything that did it. No one converted me. There was no flash of light on the road to Damascus. But suddenly I was. And then I was president of the Baptist Pacifist Fellowship-before I ever heard of FOR. FOREST: Many people think of themselves as post-World War II pacifists. They imagine that, had they been of military age before Hiroshima, they might have been volunteers in the war against Hitler. World War II, in their minds, was the last "just war." But you became a pacifist before that war, and remained one a pacifist throughout. Wasn't that difficult? HESSLER: Being a pacifist during World War II was difficult, and it has been so ever since. Unquestionably, the things that Hitler and the Nazis were doing were evil, unqualified evil. It is still difficult to speak to the question, "What would you do about Hitler?" But we pacifists were talking about the reasons World War II would happen well before it came. Out of Versailles, out of the inequities, out of the ringing of Germany steel by the Allies, out of the refusal of the Allies to live up to their treaty agreements, out of the refusal to disarm-out of all that we saw a national paranoia being created in Germany that inevitably would produce a Hitler-like leader there. We didn't know any way to prevent the war, once Hitler was in power. But the pragmatic evidence is that we pacifists saved more Jews from Hitler than were saved by any army. Remember, the Holocaust began after the war started. Jews were being persecuted and driven out of the country. Their property was being taken. But the mass murder didn't begin until the war had underway. Even then, pacifists in Europe continued to be at the core of efforts to hide Jews and smuggle them to safety. The analysis that pacifists made about the factors driving us toward war proved quite accurate, but we were powerless to put into effect the recommendations, which might have prevented war. You know, in some ways it was easier being a pacifist then than it was during the Vietnam war In World War II we knew we were powerless. We never thought we could end the war once it began. All we could do was argue for a war without victory rather than the unconditional surrender the governments demanded. We were supporting conscientious objectors. We were rescuing the victims of the Nazis. In this country we were bringing in as many Jews as the government would allow-which, tragically, weren't very many. But we were never under the delusion that we had the political power to stop the war. During the Vietnam war, however, the peace movement thought it did have that power, and the people in it became infinitely more frustrated. ANNE'S NOTE: More later. There's a ton more, but I'm tired of typing it for tonight. I DO NOT FULLY AGREE WITH HIM. So... discuss? USAM's response should be interesting. Cata's should be pretty fun too, if he replies. |
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| Cataphrak | Sep 8 2008, 09:58 PM Post #2 |
The day needs my saving expertise.
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He has a damned good point there. The Allies after WW1 brought the second world war upon themselves. How? Simple, they acted tough when they shouldn't have, and were soft when they should have confronted Hitler. That's the difference between practical pacifism and unpractical pacifism. A Practical Pacifist would have made the Versailles treaty lenient enough on Germany to allow it to retain it's great power status or so tough that it would have all but dismembered it as a country. Versailles was a compromise between American idealism and the French desire for revenge. Even with the treaty the way it was, it would have been easy to stop Hitler when there was still time. When Hitler moved his troops into the Rheinland in 1936, his government was still shaky, his military still very weak. If France or any of the other allies had confronted the nazis with fixed bayonets right then, the Nazi Government would have collapsed and we would have been saved eighty million deaths. That's the problem with Pacifism. To uphold a usable ideal of Pacifism in this world of ours, it is necessary to, at times, enforce peace through burnished steel. Unfortunately, the times when this is necessary are hard enough to distinguish, and even when they do become obvious, the unbridled anti-war nutjobs take over and do nothing. How many lives could have been saved if the Allies had confronted the nazis when they re-introduced peacetime conscription in 1935? Or when the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931? The Anti-War activists who point to things like Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Holocaust and say that is the result of aggression, if they are right, then I can point to the entire second world war and say THAT is the cost of unpractical pacifism. Even more than warmongers, pacifists need to be cynics. To start a war, a tin-pot generalissimo only has to hope for the best, to maintain peace, a pacifist has to expect the worst. EDIT: I'm also moving this into Serious Discussion. Edited by Cataphrak, Sep 8 2008, 09:59 PM.
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6:23 AM Jul 29
