Regardless of your opinion on President Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize last December the speech he gave at the award ceremony in Oslo is worth our serious consideration. In his remarks he elaborately laid out a sweeping justification of war that rejects nonviolent resistance as sufficient in the face of today’s conflicts.
After placing the evolution of war in a historical context Obama stated that over time the “concept of a ‘just war’ emerged suggesting that war is justified only when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense if the force used is proportional and if whenever possible civilians are spared from violence.”
Believers in the just war theory like Obama often point to World War II presenting the United States as justifiably fighting to stop the scourge of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. This popular historical narrative however masks the complex web of self-interested government choices leading to military action. Prominent historian— and veteran of that war turned pacifist— Howard Zinn elaborates on the myth of this and other rationales for war in his essay “Just and Unjust War asking questions like the following:
If World War II was a conflict to end fascist expansion in Europe, then why did the United States not take action upon Hitler’s invasion of Austria, Czechoslovakia or Poland? If it was a war to stop Japanese colonial atrocities in China, then why did the United States take hostile diplomatic action (leading to the attack at Pearl Harbor) only when its own markets were threatened in the region? If it was a war to save the Jews, why did the U.S. government not take action in August of 1942 when faced with the intelligence that over 1 million Jews had already died?
Because the reality of conflict is always more muddied than the narrative presented by politicians or military officials, violent acts on either side in war should never be idealized and celebrated as heroic.
Specific wars and their narratives aside, however, a common criticism of pacifism is that its non-violent means to attain peace are ineffective at best and self-destructive at worst. Was Christ’s injunction to turn the other cheek” really literal as the Quakers and other pacifist Christians believe? Our rational minds protest screaming that such an absurdity would allow hostile forces to conquer our planet. But perhaps Christ had a greater insight into human psychology; one shared by the likes of both Gandhi— who derived his nonviolence from the Vedic principle of ‘ahimsa’— and Martin Luther King Jr. two individuals who actively used nonviolent means to obtain lasting historical transformation. They believed that at the heart of humanity lies an essential goodness that is often corrupted by the few who hold power and ideological control. As Gandhi stated it “Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty the ocean does not become dirty.”
While Obama in his speech admits that he is a “living testimony to the moral force of nonviolence he rejects the idea that nonviolence alone is sufficient in the face of enemies such as al-Qaeda or the earlier Nazi regime. Imagine, however, if the U.S. government— in the very face of terrorism— decided not to initiate a just” war in Afghanistan that has cost nearly $250 billion and instead used even a portion of that sum to escalate regional economic development and educational opportunities through a framework set up by the United Nations. The propaganda of terrorists and religious ideologues finds a widespread audience precisely because there is a hint of truth in their message of U.S. actions resembling an empire disinterested in the well-being of individual livelihoods ever-clamoring selfishly after more resources to consume. Educate the masses on their delusion at the hands of the few accompanied by U.S. acceptance and correction of wrongs committed and the active mobilization of peace becomes possible.
Ultimately however the responsibility for peace lies with us as individuals. Though it is not one the political establishment would have you take it is a higher path that reaffirms our essential humanity and transcends both class and creed. In the words of an earlier generation of peacemakers: Be realistic— demand the impossible.
