Pacifism

The term pacifism is usually used of an ideological position that is more than purely personal—the U.S. anarchist Paul Goodman (1911–1972) called himself a "fist-fighting pacifist." For others personal nonviolence in life, or a meditative path, is more important than whether one dons a uniform or picks up a weapon or takes a position against a war or revolution. It is essentially retreatist. There are many variants of these positions.

The millennia of otherworldly retreat—monastic or utopian—from a world that appears lost repeats itself as communitarian pacifism and recurrently inherits recruits from failed or dissipated antiwar movements. There is an emphasis on child development, peace education, and the construction of a more peaceful culture, which has had an impact on modern pedagogy.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948). Gandhi's policy of passive resistance—or, as he preferred to call it, satyagraha (truth and firmness)—was first manifested during his sojourn in South Africa in the late nineteenth century and continued upon his return to his homeland of India. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

Gandhi's own ambivalence on these dilemmas, expressed in his retreat after the mass 1920s campaigns became violent—again is symptomatic of this ambiguity in pacifist idealism; yet by the 1930s and 1940s he once again advocated mass nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule in India, even during wartime, while also urging such resistance to Hitlerism from the 1930s on—for those brave enough to do so. Violence in this view was the inferior weapon of the weak, preferable to cowardice, but a lesser evil at best. Gandhi's model was reproduced in Ghana to some extent, but more violent methods adopted by leftist or nationalist revolutionaries tended to dominate such struggles thereafter.

Gandhi was also a political pacifist, however, in seeking programs of social and institutional change, not merely personal transformation. He saw them as being linked—following the teachings of Leo Tolstoy—but went further than the Russian Christian anarchists in creating a political ethic of nonviolent collective action (drawing also from Thoreau's principles of civil disobedience). These ideas in turn inspired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) and other human rights leaders. In the early New Left of the 1960s and the women's movements of the 1970s and 1980s and since, the personal and the political came together again in a fusion of pacifism and antipatriarchal women's peace activisms that sought to "take the toys from the boys" not least the Cruise missiles deployed in the United Kingdom by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp at the Greenham missile base in the United Kingdom was symptomatic of hundreds of such projects, militantly antimilitarist but linked to feminist and pacifist ideologies and predominantly nonviolent in methodology.