‘REMEMBER YOUR HUMANITY AND FORGET THE REST’
(Comment/discusssion: Tony.Papard@btinternet.com)
Pacifism is a very difficult concept to put across. It is an idealist position in a very imperfect world, so most people dismiss it as impractical. For me, the concept is perhaps best described in the words of philosopher Bertrand Russell in the quotation I have used as the title of this article. Our humanity is the most important thing to hold on to – everything else is secondary. We must be willing to forget race, religion, nationality and remember that we are first and foremost all human beings. Even defending concepts such as freedom and justice must be tempered by preserving our humanity. The danger is, if we forget our humanity in the interests of various ideals we will lose sight of these ideals and create a worse situation.
I have been a pacifist most of my life, but at one point in my life I started elevating other ideals above my humanity. During my period in the Communist Party, I thought the end justified the means. Joseph Stalin was my role model – I thought that monster who murdered so many millions was the kind of strongman needed to impose Socialism on the world. Whilst never endorsing his most heinous crimes, I nevertheless saw him as a sort of strict, disciplinarian father-figure essential to the Soviet Union’s development. Despite his paranoia and terrible crimes, many people in the former Soviet Union still worship Stalin as ‘Great Stalin, Father of the Peoples’ and believe they need another ‘savior-strongman’ like him to restore their national greatness, law and order and a sense of purpose and ideals.
However, I soon realized that the end does not justify the means. That if you use violence and strong-arm tactics you lose sight of your ideals. Stalin’s methods, far from achieving Socialism and ultimately Communism, had the opposite effect. His reign of terror eliminated true Communist idealists, and left the Party and State apparatus in the hands of cunning opportunists only out to further their own careers. Benito Mussolini was once a pacifist, but he too came to believe the end justified the means. He may have made the Italian trains run on time, but few of his other ideals were realized.
War is widely accepted as a last-resort method of solving disputes when ordinary politics and diplomacy have failed. Again, the end is thought to justify the means, with disastrous consequences. War has never solved anything, all it has ever done is sown the seeds of further wars and violence. The Second World War and the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany would never have happened had it not been for the First World War, and the unfair Treaty of Versailles imposed upon Germany.
War dehumanizes people, and the other side is always depicted as a faceless, inhuman ‘enemy’. Once this concept is lodged in people’s minds, the most terrible atrocities can occur. Ordinary mothers in Birmingham can sing cheerfully as they make bombs and munitions to tear little German children to pieces, or burn them alive. Airmen in Bomber Command dropped explosives and incenderies on Hamburg and other German cities, causing a firestorm which burned people alive. They are just as guilty of war crimes as the Nazis themselves; they might just as well have taken a blow-torch and held it in the faces of thousands of babies. Everyone who endorses such atrocities as bombing civilians is a war criminal, and should be brought to justice before an international criminal court. The Nuremburg trials were victors’ justice at the end of World War II – the top Nazis were tried and sentenced, but war criminals like Churchill, ‘Bomber’ Harris and the Americans who authorized the testing of atomic bombs on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki never came to trial. War dehumanizes all participants and creates war criminals of them all.
What are the alternatives to war in extreme situations? Ultimately, a new world order needs to be established which downgrades national sovereignty. Already this is happening with the proposal for an International Criminal Court at The Hague which will be able to impose international justice. Increasingly nations are joining forces to apprehend those guilty of genocide, but still it is victors’ justice. Milosevic might have been brought before an international tribunal, but what about the British and American pilots who rained bombs down upon Serbia killing thousands of innocent people? Who is going to bring them to justice? They actually made the situation worse rather than better in the short-term, sealing the fate of many Albanians in Kosovo. Safe in their planes at over 10,000 feet, so high they couldn’t accurately see who or what they were bombing, these pilots were invulnerable, so Serb anger was vented on the defenseless Albanian population. Most of the atrocities in Kosovo took place after the bombing of Serbia began. War, the greatest atrocity of all, causes the breakdown of normal codes of behavior, and actually promotes atrocities on all sides.
The Second World War is often cited as the ultimate ‘just’ war because of the terrible Nazi crimes. But far from preventing the concentration camps and the cold-blooded murder of six million Jews plus other minorities, the War sealed their fate. Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ was a war-time policy devised when Germany was fighting on two fronts. It is so much easier to commit such atrocities in a war situation – after all few Germans were going to worry about the fate of Jews, Gipsies, gays and Communists when Allied bombs were raining down on their cities, and their sons were being killed on the Eastern Front in Russia fighting what many Germans saw as the Jewish Boshevik conspiracy known as the Soviet Union.
People tend to exaggerate the potential consequences for Britain if Germany had won the War. I have heard comments such as: ‘None of us would be here’. What utter nonsense! As they spread themselves thinner on the ground, occupying more and more countries, the troops of the Third Reich would have become weaker. They would have installed puppet rulers, such as Edward VIII (a.k.a. the Duke of Windsor) and Sir Oswald Mosley as Head of State and Prime Minister in Britain, but just as Franco’s dictatorship in Spain didn’t survive Franco, Nazism wouldn’t have survived Hitler. We would have ended up today with a European Union with a single currency had Germany won the War. Sound familiar?
In all situations, Bertand Russel’s advice to ‘remember your humanity and forget the rest’ is the key. Suppose mainland Britain had been occupied by Third Reich troops, how should the general population have reacted? Well, in the first place the majority of the occupying troops would have not been Nazis, but ordinary conscripts. We have to see beyond the uniform and the nationality and recognize the human being beneath. ‘Fraternizing with the enemy’ is supposed to be a heinous crime in wartime, but in fact it is what everyone should do. Invite a German soldier home to meet mother, ask to see photos of his family, get to know the occupying troops first and foremost as human beings. Once we are seen as ordinary people rather than as ‘the enemy’ and we see them in that light, atrocities become much less ikely to occur.
The important thing is to break down the military mentality which de-humanizes ‘the enemy’. Our only enemy is war itself, and the atrocities it causes people to commit. If an occupying army marching into a defeated country faces a hostile and dangerous population, it will be looking over its shoulder for bombs and bullets all the time. In this situation it is easy for atrocities to occur – it becomes a constant ‘war against terrorism’ in the eyes of the occupying forces, a ‘war of liberation’ in the eyes of self-styled freedom fighters. Either way, a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt. How different it might be if the occupying forces, instead of meeting a hail of bullets and bombs, were greeted with open arms and bunches of flowers. Not because they are part of an oppressive occupying force, but because they are all individual human beings with mothers and families of their own, and they are visitors to our shores. Uninvited visitors, but visitors nevertheless who should be shown hospitality. Break the cycle of hate and violence, of enmity and distrust and you start to break the inhuman military machine which permits war and oppression in the first place.
I was in the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus a few years ago, and was told I was the first Greek-Cypriot they knew who had visited that country. There had recently been an altercation between Greeks and Turks when Greek-Cypriots had ridden up to the Green Line on motorcycles. Our guide told us the current Turkish-Cypriot joke: that the Greeks should have approached the border with tanks, not motorcycles. I said, that as an Anglo-Greek-Cypriot, I thought the Greek-Cypriot motorcyclists should have come to the border, not with tanks, but with flowers. This seemed to create quite a favorable impression. For heaven’s sake we are all people, we’ve just got to learn to live together!
Whenever reconciliation has been tried, when instead of revenge and hate, two opposing parties have tried to reach out and understand each other, remarkable and unexpected things have happened. IRA bombers have met their victims, and new positive relationships have developed. Meet hate with hate and the cycle of revenge and violence never ends. Remember your humanity and forget the rest – love and forgiveness break the cycle of violence. If we cannot go that far, at least we can reach out and communicate, try to understand where the other person is coming from, get to know them as a person. This is a start, friendship may come later, but the military concept of ‘the faceless inhuman enemy’ has been broken as soon as we reach out to the other side as human beings.
However, I am not suggesting this can be the solution in all cases. Are policemen to love and forgive criminals, letting them off scot-free? I think not. There will be situations when we have to act decisevely to prevent an atrocity occurring. Some pacifists take an absolutist line, and will never contemplate violence under any circumstances. I cannot personally take that attitude. There are extreme circumstances when extreme measures may be necessary, but we have to be very careful how and when we use them.
Always holding fast to Bertrand Russell’s maxim about remembering our humanity, there are circumstances where we have to make very difficult decisions. If you witnessed an atrocity about to happen, whether it was Serb soldiers about to massacre Bosnian or Albanian civilians, or the Gestapo about to take a Jewish family to an extermination camp, your humanity would demand you try and do something to prevent it if you possibly could. It is up to individuals what methods they would use in such extreme situations, but I would not rule out violence, even to the point of killing those about to commit the atrocity as a very last resort in order to save the innocent victims.
This is a very difficult concept, but it has to be faced. I am not sure if I could pull the trigger myself, I would only know if and when, God forbid, I found myself in such a dreadful situation. Logically, I admit that violence and even taking the life of another human being may be the only way to prevent an even greater atrocity. Armed police have to shoot gunmen dead to prevent them killing more innocent people, I have no real quarrel with that. The only thing I would point out is that non-lethal weapons can be developed which would allow the perpetrator to be incapacitated without killing them in many cases, but in the absence of such non-lethal weapons, it may be necessary to shoot to kill, or at least to incapacitate, in order to prevent an atrocity.
We must be very careful how we use this argument however. It is not always justified to take lives in order to save even more lives. That sort of mentality justifies the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to shortern the War in the Far East and ‘save the lives of many Allied soldiers’.
It can NEVER, EVER be justified to kill innocent civilians under any circumstances whatsoever. Nuclear weapons, by their enormous and indiscriminate power, are completely illegal, and anybody who supports their use or threatened use is a war criminal. True, that makes the majority of the population of nuclear states like UK and USA war criminals, but what else would you call it if you are willing for someone to press a button on your behalf and murder millions of innocent men, women and children? No circumstances can justify that, not even if we are under nuclear attack ourselves. If a mass murderer wipes out a whole street of families, does that give any survivors the right to wipe out the whole street where the murderer lives? If a killer is traced to a particular town, does that give the police the right to bomb that town and raze it to the ground? This isn’t enforcing law and order, it is the very opposite. War is the complete breakdown of civilization, in other words, anarchy. Nuclear war would be even worse, the complete destruction of civilization and possibly life on this planet.
Any response to any situation, however extreme, must be measured and proportionate. If a criminal act has been committed, the response must be aimed at the perpertrators only, and with the main aim of stopping further crimes being committed, rather than revenge. If you follow the maxim: ‘an eye for an eye’ the whole world will end up blind.
In the world situation today, states are coming together in economic groupings such as the European Union. I believe these will develop into federal super-states, much like the USA or old USSR. The out-dated concepts of national sovereignty must be gradually laid aside – after all thousands of years ago England was a collection of warring kingdoms. The trend now must be to internationalism, joining together in international federations to protect human rights, justice, democracy and preserve peace worldwide.
The United Nations must be strengthened, and it must have a permanent security force under the auspices of the UN General Assembly. I would go further and say all national military forces should be handed over to the United Nations and become part of this UN Security Force. Every state on the planet should be occupied by this UN Security Force, who would police the world and have the power to arrest and bring to justice before the International Criminal Court anybody who violates human rights.
In order to achieve this we must give up the idea of national sovereignty once and for all. We all share the same planet, and we are all interdependent. By coming together in a worldwide federation we can preserve world security and peace, and still keep our democracy. Only matters dealing with world security would come under the UN, other matters would be devolved downwards to Continental parliaments like the European one, and then to national parliaments like the British one, and finally down to regional and local level.
The various states of the USA retain a great deal of autonomy, and this could happen in any worldwide federation too. But we cannot trust security to national governments and national security forces because this just leads to war, anarchy and the complete breakdown of civilized norms in wartime. If our planet’s civilization is to survive, we need to unite in order to protect our joint security and also our environment. Selfish nationalist interests cannot be allowed to get in the way, everyone must be subservient to the United Nations in environmental and security matters, with no exceptions.
Any UN security force would, of necessity, be armed. But it would be armed with the necessary weapons to peform its job of preserving peace, law and order, not indiscriminate weapons. Non-lethal weapons could be developed, but it may well be necessary for the security force to be also armed with lethal weapons, like many conventional police forces, so long as these were only used as a last resort and only against those about to commit some atrocity. Indiscriminate weapons such as bombs, mines, hand grenades, machine guns, missiles, etc. must be made completely illegal.
It is possible to have a world without war. The European Union is an example of how it might start to work. In the last century Europe was a hotbed of war, now it is largely united with a single currency and a European Parliament. We have a choice, either we give up national sovereignty or we face the prospect of never-ending wars which may well one day destroy civilization and make our planet uninhabitable.
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Comments:
Just a note of thanks for your web site. I am working out my own pacifist beliefs, and your essay was very helpful. Thanks. Chris.