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From: Hibbert.pa@XEROX.COM
Newsgroups: mod.politics
Subject: Re: Pacifism
Message-ID: <12236062797.58.MCGREW@RED.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Wed, 3-Sep-86 17:00:25 EDT
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Posted: Wed Sep  3 17:00:25 1986
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Keith Lynch wrote:

        "You could argue that if only everyone on Earth 
        (and beyond Earth) was pacifistic, that pacifism 
        would work.  This is true, but it is also true that if 
        there was just one exception, just one person willing 
        to use violence, he could take over the world and 
        enslave everyone."

I disagree.  All the non-pacificist could do would be to kill
pacifists.  The point that pacifism makes is that if each of us
refuses to use violence, even on threat of violence to ourselves, then
none of us can be a tool for enslaving others.

This leads to a question I have for people might be worried about a
soviet attack on the US: What would they do once they had conquered
the government?  If we all refused to go along with the government, it
would be powerless.

In a similar vein, the Feb 3 issue of The New Yorker has an excellent
and inspiring article on the Polish opposition movement, by Jonathan
Schell.  For a period of a few years before and during the rise of
Solidarity, there was an active movement of individuals that attempted
to live as if they were free.  Here's a short excerpt from the
article:

"The classic formula for revolution is first to seize state power and
then use that power to do the good things you believe in. In the
Polish revolution, the order was reversed....Its simple but radical
guiding principal was to start doing the things you think should be
done, and to start being what you think society should become.... The
opposition's style has been to act "as if" Poland were already a free
country. And once those in opposition began to act that way something
unexpected happened...the "as if" started to melt away.

... While this style of action was non-violent, "nonviolence" seems 
both too restrictive and too negative a term with which to describe
it: too restrictive because, along with being non-violent, the
movement was also nondeceptive, nonsecretive, and non many other
obnoxious things; and too negative because the deepest source of its
strength was not any form of abstinence but, rather, the positive,
energetic, open pursuit of a free and just society through incessant
public action.

... Non-violent action, far from being helpless in the face of
totalitarianism, turns out to be especially well suited to fighting
it....The government crackdown has taken its toll, but the spirit of
opposition is alive....The arrests are made, but people are not
intimidated. They live now in what may be the most curious conditions
to have developed in Poland so far: autonomy without liberty--freedom
together with jail."

Chris
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