As usual, I write about one of the many movements I participated in, but now find to be wrong. I organized, was arrested and carried out illegal acts for the peace movement. Now I apologize for my wrong ideas and bad behavior.
I propose this as a book called the Dark History of the Peace Movement. Books and PhD theses are getting picked-up from my blogs. Help yourself.
Many people feel comfortable saying that they believe in peace. Such people, including many of my friends and relatives, say they believe in the ultimate rationale of a peaceful settlement in nearly every conflict. Such peace supporters are usually referring to civil wars and international conflicts.
It is universally accepted by ordinary people in America, Japan and Europe that the idea of peace and peaceful resolution of national and international conflict is a respectable idea.
It isn't a respectable idea. History is replete with examples that are contrary to the notion of a peace movement. In fact, there is virtually no evidence to support such the untenable idea of a peace movement. The function of this proposed book is to dispel the irrational idea of a viable peace movement or force its proponents to defend their position.
This is to be a history book. The book begins with the historic event recorded in song, of a peaceful Christmas on the front lines in WWI where the soldiers got out of their trenches, traded food, drink and song. The historic event is used as evidence that soldiers, ordinary people, don't want to go to war.
History needs to be revealed to the readers. The soldiers were killing each other the day after Christmas and for two more years without respite. There were few desertions in WWI, and certainly no more after this Christmas event than before. War is not driven by anger or interpersonal feelings. Soldiers die for their comrades but not out of hate or anger.
To fully discredit the peace movement it is important to look at the two classic examples of peace activists and review their history. The most famous and the most undeserving example of a peace activist is Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi is cited as the perfect example of a founder of the modern peace movement who led his people to political independence using non-violent peace tactics.
A review of Indian history reveals a different story. India in Gandhi’s 1930s was a nation with hundreds of millions of people who could have driven the few thousands of British out of the country simply by holding hands and marching them into the Indian Ocean. The problem was that Indians were bereft of organizational skills and had no competence as warriors. There was no alternative to non-violence.
Worse than that. When WWII began, Gandhi went to England and threatened to support Hitler unless Britain agreed to give India independence after the war. His threat was militarily pathetic, but England was desperate to withdraw troops from India. In any case, Britain wanted to use the few good soldiers in the Indian Army, the Sikhs.
After independence was granted, non-violence was completely forgotten as India and Pakistan went to war with each other. Two incompetent armies killing each other; one, presumably, the army of a great non-violent nation.
The second classic example of purported successful non-violence is Martin Luther King Jr. and the marches to end Jim Crow in the American South.
M. L. King Jr. was successful and his movement was non-violent. The historical trouble with this story is: the driving force in King’s movement was the moral force of the thousands of Blacks who had served in the U.S. military in WWII. The complete integration of the U.S. military on Southern bases created incessant political friction. The fact that King was fully cognizant of this military service moral issue led him to put WWII veterans, in uniform, at the front of all his marches.
Add two other factors. One judicial. The U.S. Supreme Court had ordered desegregation of all public education before the anti-Jim Crow movement got underway. School desegregation was slowly being carried out by federal marshals in the South, independent of King. Courts were regularly ruling that interstate commerce could not be segregated and this was also being carried out independent of King.
Second, President J.F. Kennedy, who showed no interest in supporting M. L. King Jr., was assassinated and the Vice President who succeeded him, a Texan committed to racial integration, had been the most powerful legislator in decades. The new president, L.B. Johnson, used sympathy for the assassination of Kennedy to push legislation ending Jim Crow, especially at the polls and in the work place. Again, an action independent of King.
As in India, after the anti-Jim Crow movement had publicly succeeded, non-violence was forgotten or discredited. The U.S. faced five years of violent annual urban summer rioting by blacks killing mostly each other and destroying their own neighborhoods.
The next points of historic evidence that should shame any proper pacifist were the outcomes of Buddhist pacifism. Both Tibet and Sri Lanka have been Buddhist nations for a millennium. Neither has fared well in the world. Tibet was over run by the Chinese in the 1950s and the Buddhist government was replaced. Sri Lanka faced a long and violent civil war from a minority population of Tamils. In neither case did pacifism protect the population from conquest by an invader or civil war.
One recent historic case is a direct discreditation of pacifism, but isn’t widely known. A group of Americans, under David Hartsough, worked in the predominantly Albanian city of Pristina, capital of Kosovo, for five years in the mid 1990s to create the largest base of citizens trained in non-violent tactics anywhere in history. Better than 60% of the population of 400,000 people were directly involved in non-violent training and created their own independent Albanian education, university and health system to support their communal non-violent peace involvement.
When the Serbian army invaded the country and city in 1999 they drove the entire population into the next country, Macedonia, where the Kosovar Albanians remained until American and NATO bombing raids in Belgrade forced the Serbian Army to leave Kosovo.
Thanks directly to several months of bombing, the Kosovars were able to return to their homes.
The final example brings the weight of great minds and a century of debate to the issue of a non-violent peace movement. Beginning in the late 1880s European Jews began to slowly buy land in the Palestinian part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. From the beginning the Jewish community around the world discussed the necessity of peaceful community relations with the indigenous Arab population. The great Martin Buber led the debate in favor of a non-violent peace movement. Buber was supported in this global debate by hundreds of important and prominent thinkers, including Albert Einstein.
The peak of the peace movement was reached in the summer of 1999 when 100,000 Israelis were members of Peace Now. Peace Now was able to muster many hundreds of thousands of supporters in the U.S. and Europe.
The strongest redoubt of non-violent pacifism was Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which had advocated Martin Buber’s ideas for over 75 years.
Things changed by 2003, when Peace Now had virtually no members and was barely able to produce 2,000 demonstrators in Israel. After a lethal explosion in the cafeteria, Hebrew University had only one remaining professor willing to publicly support a peace movement.
The Israeli population which was over 80% in support of the peace movement in 1999, was by 2003 in total support of walling off Palestinians and of refusing to negotiate any form of peace treaty. An amazing reversal occurred in three years, after a century of active global debate on the issue of a non-violent peace movement in the Middle East.
The authors of A Dark History of the Peace Movement may want to leave out this last Israeli section. Many lay pacifists and most activists in the movement are anti-Israel to the point of often being anti-Semitic.
This last section, which would incorporate most important thinkers on the matter and the longest history of debate on the subject, would directly offend many pacifists.