THOUGHTLESSLY I SAID to the Russian sailor in the coast guard station, “You should also come and see us in America.” He looked at me, laughing, with his broad young face. “How could we come to America? That’s impossible. We are warriors.” It was strange to hear him use that word, voyenniye—“warriors.” He looked so unwarlike, sitting with his friends around the table and chatting with us about pi-mesons and mu-mesons. And yet the word spoke truth. His trade was war. He belonged to that ancient brotherhood of warriors which Alexander Blok described in his poems, the horsemen riding by night over the field of Kulikovo, the twelve marching in the snowstorm through the desolate streets of Petrograd. All his friendliness, his intellectual curiosity, his boyish humor could not alter the fact that he was a willing tool of Soviet power. A warrior he was, and a warrior he would remain, even after he finished his term of military service and found his niche in civilian society. All his life, he would be proud to have been a part of the Soviet navy. If ever he was called to sail into battle and die for his country, he would hesitate no more than those who sailed with Nelson at Trafalgar. If ever he was called to launch the missile that would obliterate a city, he would hesitate no more than those who aimed the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When I imagine nuclear war, the nightmare begins with that young Russian sailor pressing the button which blows us all to smithereens, and as he presses it, he says, “We are warriors,” with that same laughing voice of murderous innocence which I heard in Leningrad long ago.
Is there no other way? Is there no other tradition for our young men to follow than the tradition of warriors marching into battle to defend the honor of their tribe? Indeed there is another tradition, the tradition of pacifism, which also has a long and honorable history. For hundreds of years there have been religious sects which held warfare to be contrary to the will of God. Anabaptists and Quakers were preaching the gospel of nonviolence in the seventeenth century, and suffering persecution for their beliefs. This old tradition of nonviolence was personal rather than political. The Quakers allowed no authority to come between the individual conscience and God. They refused, as individuals, to bear arms or to take any part in the waging of wars. They did not seek political power for themselves or attempt to control the actions of governments. They simply declared that they would not take any action forbidden by their consciences. The tradition of personal pacifism which they established has proved durable. It has lasted for three hundred years and has taken root in many countries. Pacifism as a code of personal ethics has proved itself able to weather the storms of war and political change.
Pacifism as a political program is a more recent development. A political pacifist is one who advocates the ethic of nonviolence as a program for a political movement or for a government. Theorists of pacifism make a sharp distinction between personal and political pacifism. In the real world, this distinction is useful but never sharp. There is a continuum of pacifism, extending all the way from the private faith of the traditional conscientious objector to the modern rituals of nonviolent demonstration staged by political action groups in front of television cameras. Pacifism may be a matter of individual conscience or a matter of tactical calculation. Most commonly it is a mixture of both. If pacifism is ever to prevail in the modern world, it must be both personal and political, cherishing the deep roots of the religious pacifist tradition and at the same time exploiting the opportunities provided by modern communications to mobilize public protest. Gandhi, the first and greatest of modern political pacifists, showed us how it can be done.
The Quakers stand in the middle of the pacifist continuum, not so fully engaged in politics as Gandhi, not so detached as the Amish of Pennsylvania, who try to withdraw altogether from the violence and evil of the world. Quakers live in the world of anger and power and seek to mitigate its evils. The Quaker ethic has always encouraged its adherents to concern themselves with other people’s sufferings. “Concern” in the Quaker vocabulary means more than sympathy; it means practical help for people in need and practical intervention against injustice. Large numbers of Quakers, following the example of their founder, George Fox, express their concern by campaigning in the political arena for humanitarian and pacifist ideals. But they act as individuals, not as an organized movement. Perhaps the main reason for the durability of the Quakers’ influence is the fact that they are tied to no government and no party. Their pacifism is a private commitment based on conscience, not a political tactic dependent on success or popularity. They are not, like the followers of Gandhi, liable to defect from their pacifist principles when the political winds change.
The great and permanent achievement of the Quakers was the abolition of slavery. This social revolution, with the accompanying profound changes in public morality, took centuries to complete and was not the work of Quakers alone. But the earliest agitators against slavery were mostly Quakers. All through the eighteenth century, in England and in America, Quakers were prime movers in the uphill struggle, first to put an end to the profitable trade in fresh slaves from Africa, and later to put an end to the profitable exploitation of slaves wherever they happened to be. My great-great-great-uncle Robert Haynes was a prominent citizen of the island of Barbados, owner of several sugar plantations and several hundred slaves. In his diary for the year 1804 he complained bitterly of the public agitation against slavery which was then gathering strength in England. He knew who his enemies were. “I am likewise minded,” he wrote, “to attribute a fair share of the blame to the underhand activities of a sect known as Quakers. These, from the very beginnings of the settlement of our island having played a very subtle—and in these days all too little heeded—part in the instigation of others to rebellion, at the same time openly avowing their detestation to any form of violence! Not scrupling, withall, to avail themselves fully of the safety and protection afforded them by the laws and defenses of this country. All this savouring of cant and hypocrisy such as I, for one, find hard to stomach.”
The next item in Haynes’s diary explains the violence of his feelings. “Attempted rising of slaves in some parts of the Island. The above quickly suppressed—the immediate shewing of discipline taking excellent and speedy effect—but at the same time a general anxiety thus engendered by no means, even now, wholly allayed.”1 Four years later the British Parliament passed the act which put an end to the slave trade, with effective criminal penalties. Haynes continued for twenty-five years longer to enjoy an uneasy dominion over his slaves on the island. But he lived long enough to see the Quakers finally victorious, his slaves freed, and the old order of society on the island overthrown. Handsomely compensated with a cash payment for his slaves by the Act of Parliament of 1833, he moved to England and lived the rest of his life at Reading in comfortable retirement.
What were the ingredients of the Quakers’ success? First of all, moral conviction. They never had any doubt that slavery was a moral evil which they were called upon to oppose. Second, patience. They continued their work, decade after decade, undiscouraged by setbacks and failures. Third, objectivity. A large part of their work consisted of careful collection of facts and statistics which both sides in the dispute came to accept as accurate. It was the fact-gathering activities of the Quakers in Barbados which particularly infuriated my great-great-great-uncle. Fourth, willingness to compromise. The Quakers were concerned to free the slaves, not to punish the slave owners. They accepted the fact that slaves were an economic asset and that the owners were entitled to fair compensation for the loss of their property. The slave owners were not to be humiliated. As a result, even my great-great-great-uncle in the end swallowed his pride and quietly pocketed his cash settlement. The willingness of the British abolitionists to buy out the slave owners made the crucial difference between the peaceful liberation of the West Indian slaves in 1833 and the bloody liberation of the American slaves thirty years later. The British government paid the slave owners twenty million pounds. The cost of the American Civil War was considerably higher.
The abolition of nuclear weapons is a task of the same magnitude as the abolition of slavery. Nuclear weapons are now, as slavery was two hundred years ago, a manifestly evil institution deeply embedded in the structure of our society. Most people nowadays, if they think about nuclear weapons at all, worry about nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists. They imagine terrorists carrying one or two nuclear bombs in cars or trucks and exploding them in New York or Washington. One or two nuclear bombs exploding in a city would be a disaster much greater than the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. People are right to worry about terrorist bombs. But they ought to worry much more about the thousands of nuclear weapons that are not in the hands of terrorists but in the hands of national governments. Terrorist bombs could kill millions of people, while national nuclear weapons could kill hundreds of millions. National nuclear weapons used in a major war could destroy whole countries, including our own. And since the United States maintains the largest and most powerful deployments of nuclear weapons, we carry the largest share of moral responsibility for their continued existence.
People who hope to push the fight for the abolition of war to a successful conclusion must bring to their task the same qualities which won the fight for the abolition of slavery: moral conviction, patience, objectivity, and willingness to compromise. Those who fought against slavery two hundred years ago made a historic compromise which opened the way to their victory; they decided to concentrate their efforts upon the prohibition of the slave trade and to leave the total abolition of slavery to their successors in another generation. They saw that the slave trade was a more glaring evil than slavery itself and more vulnerable to political attack. They were able to mobilize against the slave trade a coalition of moral and economic interests which could not at that time have been brought together in the cause of total abolition. There is a lesson here for the peace movements of today. The ultimate aim of peace movements is the total abolition of war. All war is evil, but the use of nuclear weapons is a more glaring evil, and the abolition of nuclear weapons is a more practical political objective than the abolition of war. Modern pacifists, like the Quakers of the eighteenth century, would be well advised to attack the more vulnerable evil first. After we have succeeded in abolishing nuclear weapons, the abolition of war may become a feasible objective for later generations, but from here it is out of sight.
Pacifism as a political cause has suffered from the fact that its greatest leaders have been men of genius. People of outstanding genius, transcending the beliefs and loyalties of the tribe in which they happen to be born, tend naturally toward pacifism. Unfortunately, people of genius do not usually make good politicians. Gandhi was one of the rare exceptions. Genius and the art of political compromise do not sit easily together. Except for Gandhi, the great historic figures of pacifism have been prophets rather than politicians. Jesus in Judea, Tolstoy in Russia, Einstein in Germany, each in turn has set for mankind a higher standard than political movements can follow.
When Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, he was a Russian patriot, sympathetic to the martial spirit of his soldier characters and proud of their bravery. His skeptical realism belongs squarely, as Alexander Blok’s fevered romanticism does not, in the mainstream of Russian patriotic literature. But Russian patriotism was too narrow a frame for Tolstoy’s genius. At the age of fifty he experienced a religious conversion to the gospel of peace. He repudiated the sovereignty of all national governments, including his own. He cut himself off from the aristocratic society in which he had formerly lived. And for the last thirty years of his life he preached the ethic of nonviolence in its most uncompromising form. He demanded that we not only refuse to serve in armies and navies but also refuse to cooperate in any way with coercive activities of governments. Revolutionary action against governments was forbidden too; those who oppose a government with violence cannot lead the way to the abolition of violence. He called us to follow a way of life based on strict obedience to the words of Jesus: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, that ye resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
The Tsar’s government was wise enough not to lay hands on Tolstoy or to attempt to silence him. Only the young men who followed his teaching and refused military service were put in prison or exiled to Siberia. Tolstoy himself lived unmolested on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana with his faithful disciples and his disapproving wife. He corresponded with the young Gandhi. He became a prophet and spiritual leader for pacifists all over the world. Wherever he saw cruelty and oppression, he spoke out for the victims against the oppressors. He warned the wealthy and powerful in no uncertain terms of the explosion of violence to which their selfishness was leading: “Only one thing is left for those who do not wish to change their way of life, and that is to hope that things will last my time—after that, let happen what may. That is what the blind crowd of the rich are doing, but the danger is ever growing and the terrible catastrophe draws nearer.” The wealthy and powerful listened politely to his warning and continued on the course which led to the cataclysms of 1914 and 1917. The situation of Tolstoy at the end of his life was similar to the situation of Einstein fifty years later, the venerable white-bearded figure, wearing a peasant blouse as a symbol of his contempt for rank and privilege, universally respected as a writer of genius, disdained by practical politicians as a cantankerous old fool, loved and admired by the multitude as spokesman for the conscience of mankind.
A hundred years have now passed since Tolstoy’s conversion, and the power of nationalism over men’s minds is as strong as ever. There was perhaps a chance, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, that the working people of Europe would unite in a common determination not to be used as cannon fodder in their masters’ quarrels. This was the dream which Tolstoy dreamed, and it was shared by many of the leaders of workers’ organizations in various European countries during the years before 1914 when these organizations were growing rapidly in membership and power. The dream was an international brotherhood of workers united in loyalty to socialist and pacifist principles. The dream was an international general strike that would become effective on the day of declaration of war and would leave the generals of the belligerent armies without soldiers to command. Among the leaders who believed in international brotherhood as a practical political program for the workers of the world, Jean Jaurès of France was outstanding. Jaurès was an experienced politician, representing the French Socialist Party in the Chamber of Deputies, and reelected repeatedly by his constituency of miners. He was a patriotic Frenchman and never advocated unilateral disarmament or unconditional pacifism. He knew personally the Socialist leaders in Germany and Austria and understood the ambiguities of their position. But he believed with passionate conviction in the possibility that an international general strike against war could be successful. This dream collapsed on July 31, 1914, when the German, Austrian, and Russian armies were already mobilizing for war, the workers in each country had forgotten their international brotherhood and were marching obediently to the frontiers to defend their respective fatherlands, and Jaurès, sitting disconsolate at his supper in a restaurant in Paris, was shot dead by a fanatical French patriot.
Tolstoy’s radical pacifism never became a serious political force in Europe, and least of all in Russia, either before or after the revolution. The only effective action of workers against war occurred in 1917, when Lenin encouraged the soldiers of Alexander Kerensky’s government to desert from the front lines where they were fighting the Germans. But this desertion was not the fulfillment of Jaurès’s dream of an international strike against war; it was merely an opening move in the new war for which Lenin was preparing. As soon as Lenin had seized power, he organized a new army and used it to defend his territory against the remnants of the old army in the civil war of 1918–1921. Neither the Tsar before the revolution nor Lenin afterward hesitated to spill blood; neither had difficulty in finding an ample supply of young Russians willing to kill or to die for the defense of Russia against her enemies. The seeds of Tolstoy’s gospel of nonviolence fell mostly upon stony soil as they were carried all over the world, and nowhere was the soil stonier than in his native Russia.
The great blossoming of nonviolence as a mass political movement was the work of Gandhi in India. For thirty years he led the fight for Indian independence and held his followers to a Tolstoyan code of behavior. He proved that satyagraha, soul-force, can be an effective substitute for bombs and bullets in the liberation of a people. Satyagraha, a word and a concept invented by Gandhi, means much more than nonviolence. Satyagraha is not merely passive resistance or abstention from violent actions. Satyagraha is the active use of moral pressure as a weapon for the achievement of social and political goals. Gandhi used satyagraha impartially to castigate the British governors of India and his own followers, whenever they strayed from the path of nonviolence. With his Hindu background and his London lawyer’s training, he understood the psychology of Indian peasants and of imperial government officials, and succeeded in bending them both to his will. The chief tools of satyagraha were civil disobedience, the peaceful but ostentatious breaking of laws imposed by the alien authorities, and the fast unto death, a personal hunger strike in which Gandhi repeatedly wagered his life in order to compel friends and enemies alike to attend to his demands. The tools worked. There were many setbacks and occasional lapses into violence, but the campaign of satyagraha succeeded in winning independence for India without any war between the native population and the occupying power. British administrators found Gandhi absurd and exasperating, but they could neither shoot him nor keep him permanently in prison. When he fasted unto death they dared not let him die, knowing that no one who might take his place would be able so well to control the violent temper of his followers. Satyagraha was an effective weapon in Gandhi’s hands because he was, unlike Tolstoy, an astute politician. For thirty years Gandhi was, in effect, collaborating with the British authorities in keeping India peaceful, while at the same time defying them publicly so that he never appeared to his followers as a British stooge. Successful use of satyagraha requires, besides courage and moral grandeur, a talent for practical politics, an understanding of the weak points of the enemy, a sense of humor, and a little luck. Gandhi possessed all these gifts and used them to the full.
Gandhi’s luck ran out at the end of his life, when the campaign against British rule was won and he was trying to bring India to independence as a united country. He then had to deal with quarrels between Hindu and Muslim, deeper and more bitter than the power struggle between European and Asian. Satyagraha failed to subdue Hindu and Muslim nationalism as it had subdued British imperialism. Five months after the violent birth of independent India and Pakistan, the scene of Jaurès’s death was reenacted in Delhi. Like Jaurès, Gandhi was shot by a nationalist who considered him insufficiently patriotic.
With Gandhi, as with Jaurès, died the hope of a continent turning decisively away from war. Nehru, prime minister of newly independent India, had never been a wholehearted believer in nonviolence. The rulers of Pakistan believed in nonviolence even less. Within thirty years after independence, three wars showed how little Gandhi’s countrymen had learned from his example. India and Pakistan fought over the disputed province of Kashmir as France and Germany had fought over Alsace and Lorraine. Together with the regiments and warships of the colonial army and navy, the governments of India and Pakistan inherited an addiction to the old European game of power politics. Gandhi’s satyagraha was an effective weapon for a subject people to use against their oppressors, but his followers discarded it promptly as soon as they gained control of their own government and stood in the oppressors’ shoes.
The moral of Gandhi’s life and death is that pacifism as a political program is much more difficult to sustain than pacifism as a personal ethic. Being himself a leader of extraordinary charisma and skill, Gandhi was able to organize a whole people around a program of pacifism. He proved that a pacifist resistance movement can be sustained for thirty years and can be strong enough to defeat an empire. The subsequent history of India proved that political pacifism was not strong enough to survive the death of its leader and to withstand the temptations of power.
During the years between the two world wars, while Gandhi was successfully organizing his nonviolent resistance in India, political pacifism was also popular in Europe. European pacifists were encouraged by Gandhi’s example and hoped to revive Jaurès’s dream of an international alliance of nonviolent resisters against militaristic national governments. The pacifist dream in Europe failed disastrously. There were three main reasons for the failure: lack of leadership, lack of a positive objective, and Hitler. The European pacifists never produced a leader comparable to Gandhi. Einstein was a pacifist, and lent his name and prestige to the pacifist cause until the rise of Hitler led him to change his mind, but he had no wish to be a political leader. Like Tolstoy, he was more of a hero to the world at large than to his own countrymen. Pacifism, even at the peak of Einstein’s popularity, was never strong in Germany. It was strongest in England, where George Lansbury, a Christian Socialist with firm pacifist convictions, was leader of the Labour Party from 1931 to 1935. Lansbury was capable of courageous action in the Gandhi style. In 1930, when he was mayor of Poplar in the East End of London, he went to prison rather than submit to government policies which he considered oppressive. He remained a hero to his constituents in East London. But he never attempted to dominate the European scene as Gandhi dominated the scene in India. Gandhi had the tremendous advantage of a positive objective, the cause of Indian independence, around which he could mobilize the enthusiasm of his followers. Lansbury and the other European pacifists had no similar objective; they supported the League of Nations as an international peacekeeping authority, but the League of Nations was an inadequate focus for a mass political movement. The league was widely perceived as nothing more than a debating society for elderly politicians. Nobody could take seriously the picture of millions of Europeans defying their governments in a gesture of loyalty to the league. Gandhi was swimming with the tide of nationalism; Lansbury and his followers were swimming against it. As a result, the foreign policy of the British Labour Party under Lansbury’s leadership was wholly negative; no rearmament, no action against Hitler, and no wholehearted commitment to pacifism.
It was Lansbury’s fate to preside over the British pacifist movement at the peak of its popularity during the same years which saw Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. A few weeks before Hitler became chancellor, the undergraduates of Oxford debated the proposition “That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country,” and approved it by a substantial majority. This vote received widespread publicity and may in fact, as the opponents of pacifism later claimed, have encouraged Hitler to pursue his plans of European conquest more boldly. Whether or not Hitler paid attention to the Oxford students’ vote, there is no doubt that his aggressive policies were encouraged by the existence of strong pacifist sentiments in England and France. In October 1933, Hitler felt confident enough to withdraw from the international Disarmament Conference which had been meeting before he became chancellor; this action was an official notification to the world that he intended to rearm Germany. Four days later, Lansbury spoke for the Labour Party in the House of Commons:
We will not support an increase in armaments, but we shall also refuse to support our own or any other government in an endeavour to apply penalties or sanctions against Germany. No one will ask for these if the great nations immediately, substantially disarm and continue until universal disarmament is accomplished.
The great nations were not about to disarm, as Lansbury well knew. His policy meant that England would simply do nothing, neither arm nor disarm. He was caught in the tragic dilemma of political pacifism. The pacifists of England and France, by announcing their unwillingness to fight, made Hitler more reckless in risking war and made the war more terrible when it came. There is no easy answer to this dilemma. A country facing an aggressive enemy must decide either to be prepared to fight effectively or to follow the path of nonviolence to the end. In either case, the decision must be wholehearted and the consequences must be accepted. The example of England in the 1930s proves only that a halfhearted commitment to pacifism is worse than none at all. Halfhearted pacifism is in practice indistinguishable from cowardice. European pacifism became finally discredited when World War II began and halfhearted pacifists could not be distinguished from cowards and collaborators. The debacle of European pacifism has at least one clear lesson to teach us: pacifists, if they are to be effective in the modern world, must be as wholehearted and as brave as Gandhi.
In 1935 Lansbury was forced to choose between his pacifist principles and his position as leader of the Labour Party. Being an honest man, he stuck to his principles and handed over the leadership of the party to Clement Attlee, the same Attlee who became prime minister ten years later and made the decision to arm Britain with nuclear weapons. Pacifism as an effective political force in England was dead. But it was still alive in India. Young Englishmen like me, who were against the establishment and against the empire, acclaimed Gandhi as a hero. We greatly preferred the flamboyant Gandhi to the powerless Lansbury and the colorless Attlee. Our conversation was sprinkled with the rhetoric of pacifist doctrine. If only we had a leader like Gandhi, we said, we would fill the jails and bring the warmongers to their senses. We continued to talk in this style, while Hitler filled his concentration camps in Germany and silenced those who opposed his policies. Then in 1940 Hitler attacked and overran France. We were face to face, as Lansbury had been in 1933, with the classic pacifist dilemma. We still believed theoretically in the ethic of nonviolence, but we looked at what was happening in France and decided that nonviolent resistance would not be effective against Hitler. Reluctantly, we concluded that we had better fight for our King and Country after all.
Forty years later, a book, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, was written by Philip Hallie, telling the story of a French village which chose the path of nonviolent resistance against Hitler.2 It is a remarkable story. It shows that nonviolence could be effective, even against Hitler. The village of Le Chambon sur Lignon collectively sheltered and saved the lives of many hundreds of Jews through the years when the penalty for this crime was deportation or death. The villagers were led by their Protestant pastor, André Trocmé, who had been for many years a believer in nonviolence and had prepared them mentally and spiritually for this trial of strength. When the Gestapo from time to time raided the village, Trocmé’s spies usually gave him enough warning so that the refugees could be hidden in the woods. German authorities arrested and executed various people who were known to be leaders in the village, but the resistance continued unbroken. The only way the Germans could have crushed the resistance was by deporting or killing the entire population. Nearby, in the same part of France, there was a famous regiment of SS troops, the Tartar Legion, trained and experienced in operations of extermination and mass brutality. The Tartar Legion could easily have exterminated Le Chambon. But the village survived. Even Trocmé himself, by a series of lucky accidents, survived.
Trocmé learned many years later how it had happened that the village survived. The fate of the village was decided in a dialogue between two German soldiers, representing the bright and the dark sides of the German soul. On the one side, Colonel Metzger, an appropriate name meaning “butcher” in German, commander of the Tartar Legion, killer of civilians, executed as a war criminal after the liberation of France. On the other side, Major Schmehling, Bavarian Catholic and decent German officer of the old school. Both Metzger and Schmehling were present at the trial of Dr. Le Forestier, a medical doctor in Le Chambon who was arrested and executed as an example to the villagers. “At his trial,” said Schmehling when he met Trocmé later, “I heard the words of Dr. Le Forestier, who was a Christian and explained to me very clearly why you were all disobeying our orders in Le Chambon. I believed that your doctor was sincere. I am a good Catholic, you understand, and I can grasp these things.… Well, Colonel Metzger was a hard one, and he kept on insisting that we move in on Le Chambon. But I kept telling him to wait. I told Metzger that this kind of resistance had nothing to do with violence, nothing to do with anything we could destroy with violence. With all my personal and military power I opposed sending his legion into Le Chambon.”
That was how it worked. It was a wonderful illustration of the classic concept of nonviolent resistance. You, Dr. Le Forestier, die for your beliefs, apparently uselessly. But your death reaches out and touches your enemies, so that they begin to behave like human beings. Some of your enemies, like Major Schmehling, are converted into friends. And finally even the most hardened and implacable of your enemies, like the SS colonel, are persuaded to stop their killing. It happened like that, once upon a time, in Le Chambon.
What did it take to make the concept of nonviolent resistance effective? It took a whole village of people, standing together with extraordinary courage and extraordinary discipline. Not all of them shared the religious faith of their leader, but all of them shared his moral convictions and risked their lives every day to make their village a place of refuge for the persecuted. They were united in friendship, loyalty, and respect for one another.
Sooner or later, everybody who thinks seriously about the meaning of war in the modern age must face the question whether nonviolence is or is not a practical alternative to the path we are now following. Is nonviolence a possible basis for the foreign policy of a great country like the United States? Or is it only a private escape route available to religious minorities who are protected by a majority willing to fight for their lives? I do not know the answers to these questions. I do not think that anybody knows the answers. The example of Le Chambon shows us that we cannot in good conscience brush such questions aside. Le Chambon shows us what it would take to make the concept of nonviolent resistance into an effective basis for the foreign policy of a country. It would take a whole country of people standing together with extraordinary courage and extraordinary discipline. Can we find such a country in the world as it is today? Perhaps we can, among countries which are small and homogeneous and possess a long tradition of quiet resistance to oppression. But how about the United States? Can we conceive of the population of the United States standing together in brotherhood and self-sacrifice like the villagers of Le Chambon? It is difficult to imagine any circumstances which would make this possible. But history teaches us that many things which were once unimaginable nevertheless came to pass. At the end of every discussion of nonviolence comes the question which Bernard Shaw put at the end of his play Saint Joan:
O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive thy Saints? How long, O Lord, how long?
Since this chapter was written in 1984, the emphasis in discussions of war and peace has shifted from national conflicts to the so-called “war against terrorism.” In my view, the policy of turning the fight against terrorism into a war is practically ineffective as well as morally wrong. The effective tools for fighting terrorism are civilian police forces and civil defense. Granted that the ends of defeating terrorism are morally justified, it does not follow that the use of war as a means is justified. The “war against terrorism” is probably creating new terrorists faster than it eliminates old ones. To be opposed to this particular war, it is not necessary to be a pacifist.
The story of Le Chambon sur Lignon is told in an excellent documentary film, Weapons of the Spirit, produced by Pierre Sauvage in 1987, with many villagers who had been participants in the passive resistance speaking on camera. Sauvage was born in the village while his Jewish parents were hidden there.