Pacifism's Invisible Current

By Charles Krauthammer

Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord.

--Zechariah 4: 6

Gandhi represents 20th century politics' closest brush with sainthood. Yet in this season of celebrating his character, little attention has been given to his context. Or rather, the wrong attention. The usual objection raised against Gandhi is: What would he have done against France? It is important to insist on the right question, because to say that Gandhi would have failed against the radical and unique evil of Nazi Germany is to say merely that he would have failed against history's exception (and done no worse than much of a heavily armed and decidedly non-pacifist Europe). But to say, as Ho Chi Minn did in 1922, that Gandhi "would have long since entered heaven had [he] been born in one of the French colonies" is to admit that the failure of nonviolence may be the historical rule.

To be sure, the rule has two great exceptions. It is no accident, however, that these two exceptions, the movements of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, took place within the political and moral boundaries of liberal democratic politics steeped in constitutional values, and thus susceptible to the constraint of law and the power of shame. Where law and shame are less easily mobilized, nonviolence has not fared well.

It is no refutation of the philosophy of nonviolence to point out that its successes are terribly rare and difficult. Nonviolence as a moral theory is simply not subject to such empirical disproof. The principled rejection of violence is endowed with a nobility that is, if anything, enhanced by its impracticality, by the fact that its practitioners knowingly expose themselves to danger and worse. It is because of this noble impracticality that in America pacifism (of the conscientious objector, for example) evokes at once respect and curiosity.

Principled pacifism has never found fertile soil in the U.S. It remains a minority belief. In its place has grown a new pacifism, also rejecting the use of force, but on other, more American grounds. The grounds are pragmatic; the appeal is to prudence; and the theory is that force is to be abjured because, ultimately, it is futile. The new pacifism is not the practice of a crackpot cult. It represents a strongly felt, but almost invisible current of contemporary American thought. Invisible, because its most serious manifestation is not the antinuclear movement, which is neither particularly new (it is as old as its twin, the Bomb) nor necessarily pacifist, since one need not be a pacifist to oppose the suicide that is nuclear war. Apart from the question of unilateralism, a belief less in pacifism than in the safety of surrender, the only real debate on nuclear war is about how to prevent it. When it comes to nuclear war, everyone is a pacifist. The new pacifism is deeper and more subtle, a reaction not to visions of nuclear apocalypse, but to the more mundane reality of conventional war. It is particularly evident in the U.S. response to the three main wars of 1982.

The first of these is the civil war, now suspended in uneasy armistice, between the Polish state and the Polish people. As Solidarity grew in numbers and strength during the Polish spring of 1980-81, the Western view that it was too dangerous for the regime to stop Solidarity moved imperceptibly to the view that it had become impossible: How could any army put down the unit ed opposition of 10 million souls, the yearning to be free of an entire society? On Dec. 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski gave the answer. It was a technical one: decapitate the movement by arresting its leaders, atomize the followers by cutting off telephones, and demoralize them with a massive (otherwise superfluous) show of tanks and transports. The coup was so swift, so stunning, so successful that it provoked only disbelief. The first reaction was to rub one's eyes and try to explain that what was happening could not be happening. The second was to say that it wouldn't work: in the long run tanks cannot suppress the spirit of 10 million people.

The long run. A few months later, when the British fleet sailed to the Falklands, it was said with equal certainty that even if Britain won them back, in the long run it would not be able to keep them. How could a weary Britain hold on to a territory 8,000 miles from home against an aroused adversary tied to the islands by bonds of memory and pride, and only 400 miles away? And when weeks later Israel marched into Lebanon, it was said that while Israeli arms could defeat the P.L.O., they could never defeat Palestinian nationalism; in the long run, any victory would be written in sand.

What does the long run mean? If the model is what Rome did to Carthage, then Jaruzelski, Thatcher and Begin have gained little. But that mistakes their intentions. Jaruzelski and his Soviet mentors know that Eastern Europe operates on roughly a twelve-year cycle of popular eruptions. That does not mean that the coup was futile; only that the Soviets may have to arrange for another one in the 1990s.

For Britain, the long run may mean a generation in which to rethink and ultimately renegotiate its arrangements with the Falklands. And for the Israelis, the long run may mean a decade or two of relative peace on their northern frontier. For a mother raising children in Qiryat Shemona, that may be long enough.

It does no good to argue that these wars failed to crush Polish or Argentine or Palestinian nationalism. A general's dreams are never the same as his intentions, which in these campaigns were more limited: to make possible things that were once thought impossible, to rearrange what the Soviets call the correlation of forces, to change the terms of reality, debate and thus ultimately negotiation. Far from excluding negotiations, a primary purpose of these wars was to alter their terms. When Jaruzelski talks to Walesa, Britain to Argentina, and Israel to the Palestinians, as in the long run they must, the grounds will have changed. Walesa has indicated his willingness to accept the new "political realities" if the regime softens its line. Argentina will at best be in a position to ask for a gradual transition to perhaps joint sovereignty with Britain. And while Palestinian nationalism lives, its locus may already have shifted from the P.L.O. in Beirut to the inhabitants of the West Bank. Voices there are now being heard speaking not of a P.L.O. state but, within the post-Lebanon terms set by the Reagan plan, of an autonomous homeland with links to its neighbors.

Skepticism about the efficacy of force colors our view not only of last year's wars but of today's, particularly those in Central America. When Senator Mark Hatfield said of El Salvador, "I think ultimately the winner is going to be the side that has the support of the people," he was confusing how elections are decided with how wars are decided. But he was also reflecting the widely held belief in history's obedience to the dictates of popular will. That belief and its corollary, the futility of force, are usually and facilely attributed to America's bitter experience in Viet Nam. Viet Nam, however, did not introduce to America the idea that political power derives from hearts and minds. In a democracy founded as an act of national will and based on the notion of popular sovereignty, that idea has a more ancient pedigree. It also has considerable power. In the Democratic response to the President's speech on Central America, Senator Christopher Dodd attacked the idea of using military means to turn back what he called "the tide of history." Indeed, against so abstract an adversary, it stands to reason that guns are poor weapons. Dodd instead proposed deployment of American ideals: justice, equity and "liberty ... our greatest strength as a nation ... a powerful and peaceful weapon against tyranny of any kind anywhere in this hemisphere."

Native American faith in the supremacy of the idea has been nourished most recently by the successes of militarily inferior revolutionary movements, like the Sandinistas and the millions of Khomeini-ites armed only with the Koran. It is true that one cannot win an armed struggle without any popular support, a fatal lesson learned by Somoza and the Shah. But as Jaruzelski showed in Poland, and Argentina showed in its initial capture of an entirely hostile Falklands population, the amount of support a well-organized force requires to seize power can be truly minimal. Even the paradigmatic Viet Nam War cannot withstand analysis as an example of the triumph of the will. The winning side was not the side that had the support of the people; it is doubtful that either side had that. In fact, the North Vietnamese found it expedient to sacrifice, in the Tet offensive, the embodiment of what popular support they had in the south, the Viet Cong. When Saigon fell, it was not to an aroused citizenry, but to tanks.

Will requires means. The Communist insurgents in Thailand had no fewer class grievances and national resentments to exploit than, say, the rebels in El Salvador. But in Thailand the Communist insurgency is moribund. It was gravely wounded when it lost the support of both Viet Nam and China, its principal patrons and suppliers of weapons, money and safe haven. The root causes of revolution, as we are wont to say, have not disappeared in Thailand; but the revolution has. Half a world away, in what used to be called the Spanish Sahara, the root causes of the Polisario struggle for independence against Morocco have not changed either.

Yet Morocco has succeeded in thwarting the Polisario rebellion not by addressing underlying conditions, not by satisfying Saharan nationalism, not by riding any of the other tides of history, but by building a wall, 350 miles long and 7 ft. high, around the only area of the Saharan territory worth fighting for. A revolution stopped by a wall. It is enough to make a Hegelian romantic weep, or at least reflect.

John Stuart Mill, who had the good fortune to be born neither a Hegelian nor a romantic but a liberal, would not have he surprised. "It is a piece of idle sentimentality," he wrote in 1859, "that truth, merely a truth, has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake." Mill was an exponent of tolerance, not force. It is precisely those thinkers, like Mill, most committed to the abolition of coercion who most deeply respect its power to break the spirit, expunge ideas, and silence truth. Indeed, it was his recognition of what the sword can do to the spirit that made Mill so fervently advocate, in civil society at least, abolishing the sword.

Today we speak in slightly different terms: not of truth, but liberation; not of swords, but guns. Mill had it right, however. It may be cynical to believe that truth comes from the barrel of a gun. But it is sentimental to believe that truth need merely stare down the barrel to prevail. -- By Charles Krauthammer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.