May / June 2005

Featured Story

Is War Good for Nonviolence?

By Ira Chernus

February 15, 2003, was a memorable day for the makers of peace. Millions of people around the world rallied, marched, and chanted against the impending US attack on Iraq. It was, by most accounts, the largest one-day antiwar protest in history.

Nevertheless, just one month later, the war began. The decline of the peace movement began too—or so it seems. The voice of peace has not been silenced during these two years. Yet it has never regained anything like the volume it had in the winter of 2003. Those of us who care for and work for peace can easily feel discouraged, as if our efforts were for naught.

History works in unexpected ways, however. Events have subterranean effects, which may not be seen until years later. That’s particularly true of wars. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, the only thing you can be certain of in war is that the course of events will surprise you. In US history, war has indeed had unpredictable and surprising impacts. More often than not, as paradoxical as it may seem, war has provided fertile soil to nurture a new burst of growth for nonviolence.

To be sure, it can happen that war weakens the movement toward a nonviolent world. The most obvious example was the Civil War. When the struggle over slavery finally broke out in bloody violence, the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and most of his followers abandoned their commitment to nonviolence. For them, slavery was the greatest of all evils. Abolitionism had been their great moral passion before they had embraced nonviolence. Once war broke out, it was evident that slavery would not end through nonviolent means. They could not resist the pressure to endorse any means, no matter how violent, to bring about the ultimate victory of good over evil.

It took decades for the nonviolence movement to recover from this shock. After the Civil War, the Universal Peace Union (UPU) barely kept the idea of nonviolence alive. Even though it had fine leaders like Alfred Love, Lucretia Mott, and Belva Ann Lockwood, its ranks dwindled to a bare handful. In the 1890s it began to revive a bit, attracting several thousand followers to its annual conferences. By the early 20th century, though, the UPU was decidedly out of date. It was dominated by traditional moral reformers, who saw war primarily as a product of individual sinful behavior. Yet the idea of ending war by persuading individuals to be more virtuous was rapidly becoming old-fashioned. So the UPU and its commitment to strict nonviolence were pushed to the margins of the peace movement. When World War I broke out, and Americans debated their role in the conflict, the antiwar forces were a broad coalition of legalist, liberal capitalist, and socialist factions. At first, the idea of nonviolence played a rather small role.

In April 1917, the antiwar forces lost the debate, and the US formally entered the war. This shock wave triggered many unforeseen changes in American life. One of them was a rebirth of the nonviolence movement in a newly invigorated but profoundly changed way. A host of young people, most of them devout Protestants and many of them ministers or seminarians, reacted against the war by rejecting the very idea of war—or violence of any sort—as a way to solve human problems. Their names would soon become the “Who’s Who” of the US nonviolence movement: A.J. Muste, Kirby Page, Norman Thomas, Roger Baldwin, John Haynes Holmes, John Nevin Sayre, Devere Allen, Frederick Libby, Jane Addams, Carrie Chapman Catt, Dorothy Day, Emily Greene Balch, Jessie Wallace Hugan,

Tracy Mygatt, Frances Witherspoon, Dorothy Detzer. They formed organizations that would endure as the institutional backbone of nonviolence in the US, most notably the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. A few years later the War Resisters League would emerge, making it clear that this movement, though led by Protestants, could be a home for all.

Although the newly revived movement seemed to emerge so suddenly, the fuel had actually been gathering for some time. It needed only the spark of war to ignite it. It was fed in part by the 19th century moralists’ ideal of love for all humanity (a religious ideal, for most). It drew, too, on the emerging idea of the individual as an organism with a right to fulfill its unique potentialities. Universal love meant each person helping all others to develop fully. Another crucial element was the new Progressive belief that individual growth depends on the social environment; love requires us to change social conditions by improving societal institutions. For the younger generation, it would no longer do to blame war on sin and immorality. They were more inclined to see war as the logical outgrowth of a maladjusted social order.

Analyzing the problem rationally, in good Progressive fashion, they quickly recognized that the social order of the enemy was very similar to, and increasingly interlocked with, the social order of the United States and its allies. Since all the nations in the war were parts of the same system, all were equally responsible for the war. So it made no sense to view war as a fight of good nations against bad nations. Since the same moral conflicts are found within every nation, they concluded, war always creates a single global struggle of the good against the evil. As they learned to think in terms of a single international system, the war critics reinforced their desire for a single global society, fostering humanistic values that transcend all national boundaries. Their ideal of peace was more than just individual moral purity. It was an ideal of institutionalized processes for nonviolent resolution of conflicts.

Among the young pacifists who championed love and the freely developing individual, many feared socialism because it seemed to promote state power and conformity. But many were drawn to socialism. It offered them the most convincing rational explanation of why the global system had produced such a horrific war. And it offered them a vision of a humane society that was pragmatic and hard-headed, yet also utopian.

Although the reborn nonviolence movement was fed by these modern streams of thought, it still flowed in a profoundly Christian channel. Many of its adherents drew on the teachings of the Social Gospel, the most modern form of Christianity in their day. They argued that, because the political and economic system was unjust, it was also un-Christian. They blended a religious appeal to the individual conscience with the Social Gospel’s concern for reforming institutions. Their important innovation was to treat those two approaches as two sides of a single coin. The structures of society would be improved when individuals obeyed the voice of conscience and acted with moral virtue. But individuals would be far more likely to obey conscience if they lived within rational, humane, and just social structures.

To support this new view they took Jesus as the model of perfect love and reform. They looked forward to the coming Kingdom of God, in which the whole society would follow Jesus’ model and be guided by love. This was not merely utopian dreaming for them: they took it as a pragmatic criterion by which to judge the present. Clearly, the present would be found lacking...and that would motivate efforts to improve it. They devoted much of their energy to traditional Christian practices of preaching and exhortation directed at the individual soul. But their desire to change society sent them into the political arena, too. They had to strengthen their organizations. They also had to ally with other organizations, both religious and secular. The persecution of antiwar activists made them feel isolated and thus drove them to organize for mutual support.

All were imbued by an optimistic hope that, once the war was over, their movement would lead US society toward ever greater heights of social justice. The years following World War I gave them cause for hope. Most Americans soon came to view their entry into World War I as a mistake. The idea that all war is a mistake attained unprecedented popularity. The broad appeal of peace boosted the fortunes of the nonviolence movement, too.

Christian love, the ideal of individual self-fulfillment, Progressivism, pragmatism, and socialism had all been very much alive before World War I. But there had been no large vibrant community of Americans dedicated to nonviolence. The fundamental structure of the modern nonviolence movement, the structure that still undergirds the movement today, was scarcely visible in the years just before the war. It was fully visible in the years just after the war. The war was the spark that ignited the fuel and created an enduring community of nonviolence.

The ideals of peace and nonviolence continued to flourish until the Nazis conquered most of western Europe in 1940. That conquest made many Americans believe that war would soon be necessary, perhaps inevitable. The ranks of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and other nonviolence groups began to thin. Once the US entered World War II, that process accelerated. The same was true in the newly formed Catholic nonviolence movement, led by Dorothy Day. Day was bombarded with criticism of her staunch antiwar stand. She saw subscriptions to the Catholic Worker newspaper, the mainstay of her movement, fall nearly seventy-five percent during the war. Judging in numerical terms, World War II weakened the nonviolence movement so badly that it took more than twenty years to build it back to the strength it had in the 1920s and early 1930s.

However, that rebuilding process could happen only because the firm foundation from the pre-war era had actually been strengthened in surprising ways by World War II itself. Leaders like Day and A. J. Muste, who were tested in their commitment to nonviolence as never before, emerged from the ordeal stronger than ever. At the same time, a new generation of young people, faced with the prospect of being drafted or seeing their loved ones drafted, were forced to think about issues of violence and nonviolence in an intensely personal way. The vast majority accepted violence as a valid way to fight Nazism. But among the small number who refused the military call were leaders of the next generation of nonviolent activists, people like David Dellinger, Bayard Rustin, James Peck, and Larry Gara.

Those who refused to serve in any military capacity often received an unintended favor from the government, which gathered them together in prisons and camps. There they could become friends, trade ideas, nurture their vision of a nonviolent world, and withstand tests that confirmed their mutual commitment to that vision. The network formed in those prisons and camps would become the backbone of much of the nonviolence movement for many years to come.

Since World War II is often remembered (rather wrongly) as a war fought to save European Jews, it is easy to forget that it also produced the first Jewish-American antiwar organization. The Jewish Peace Fellowship was founded in 1941 to defend the rights of COs, including the small but perhaps still surprising number of Jews who refused to participate in organized violence of any kind.

The Korean war also helped the nonviolence movement, though only in an indirect way: it hardened the Cold War anticommunism of the US public. In that climate, public opinion accepted and even applauded the bipartisan consensus for basing national security on the newly created hydrogen bomb. Nuclear tests and civil defense preparations in the early Fifties elicited virtually no protest. But in reaction to the Cold War’s drift toward nuclear catastrophe, a small group in New York City chose to be arrested rather than take shelter in a mock air raid drill. That action planted a seed that would soon grow into the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA), the active protest wing of the movement against nuclear testing that flourished in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Of course, many CNVA activists were nurtured by a seed planted years earlier: they were veterans of the World War II CO camps.

The efforts of the CNVA, along with SANE and other antinuclear groups, were crowned with success in the atmospheric test ban treaty of 1963. But peace activists could hardly rest on their laurels. By the time President John F. Kennedy signed that treaty, he had also sent several thousand US military “advisors” to Vietnam. Under his successor, Lyndon Johnson, the full-scale war in Vietnam would provide yet another springboard for the ideal and practice of nonviolence—this one, by most measures, the largest in US history.

During the Vietnam war, interest and involvement in nonviolence grew exponentially. Perhaps that is not surprising: no war in US history was as widely opposed as Vietnam. But the war’s impact on nonviolence went far beyond mere numbers. Like World War I, the Vietnam war had a qualitative as well as a quantitative effect. It was fed by two distinct streams—the antinuclear movement and the civil rights movement—that had already mingled in the early Sixties. The war provided the biggest catalyst to bring them together.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was hardly the first African-American to recognize the intimate link between racism and militarism. But once he began to speak publicly about it, in 1967, whites as well as blacks were more likely to get the point: opposing violence means opposing injustice everywhere. The two are inseparable, and people may enter the gate of nonviolence through a demand for justice just as readily as through a demand for peace. The World War I generation of activists had discovered this. So had Gandhi (whose writings became far more popular in the Sixties). Now their lesson was taught to a far wider, multiracial audience.

It was an audience that went beyond Christians and Jews. The great interest in Gandhi was only part of a surge of interest in all forms of Eastern spirituality, most notably Buddhist forms. Dr. King and others put a spotlight on a Buddhist monk from Vietnam, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was preaching nonviolence from a distinctly Buddhist perspective. He spoke of a new way of seeing the world in which there are no boundaries between the spiritual and the political, nor between one nation and another, because ultimately there is no boundary between self and other. There is only one vast network of “inter-being,” in which all of us share the same fate: therefore to do violence to another is to do violence to myself. Nonviolence is the highest calling, not only because it saves and nourishes the network of “inter-being,” but because only from a nonviolent perspective can we experience the truth that all is “inter-being.”

This was the same message that was being embraced, in so many forms, by the 1960s counterculture. At its worst, it may have been only a flash of drug-induced insight. At its best, though, it wove together all the strands of the Sixties vision in a complex logic. There will be peace and harmony, the thinking went, only when there is justice and equality. That can’t happen until oppressive hierarchies are torn down. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like (and capitalism, some added) are all barriers to nonviolence. But hierarchies are inevitable as long as there are boundaries. “This opposed to that” inevitably becomes “this better than (or worse than) that.” Nonviolence ultimately requires us to transcend all such distinctions. The writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, like the writings of Gandhi, provided a rich traditional language of spirituality to articulate this new way of thinking.

The Vietnam era ushered in one more very important innovation in the history of nonviolence. Far more than ever before, the movement had to make room for people whose commitment to nonviolence had no religious dimension. For some, it was largely an intuitive leap. Others were persuaded to eschew violence by secular writers like Barbara Deming and Gene Sharp, who argued in a variety of ways that nonviolence simply made good sense. In the life of the nonviolence community, this new secular approach blended quite easily with the familiar religious approaches to create a powerful force that has been with us ever since.

The Vietnam war set this force in motion, but over the last forty years, the spirit and methods of nonviolence have been applied to a wider set of arenas than ever before. The record of successes and failures since the Sixties is mixed. The fortunes of nonviolence have waxed and waned. The protests preceding the Iraq war were certainly a high point. Now, as that war goes on with no end in sight, it is easy to feel that we are at a low point. But the wars of the 20th century teach us that war’s effects on nonviolence are scarcely evident while the guns are still firing. We must wait, perhaps for years, to see those effects unfold.

How will the war in Iraq affect the movement to build a nonviolent world? Will it, like earlier wars, provide a spark that will fuse together old and new factors, to energize the nonviolence movement and help it flourish in creative new directions? If so, what might the new factors be, and what directions will the movement take? It is too soon to answer these questions. The only thing certain is that every war will, as Eisenhower said, surprise us. If the wars of the 20th century are any indicator, there may well be a silver lining to the darkness we so easily feel now. The history of the 20th century gives us reason to hope in the midst of our despair. War is often a catalyst for major leaps in the movement to end war—and that gives us reason to continue the work that must go on, every day, to bring the world a step closer to the end of war, injustice, and every form of violence.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he also served as Co-Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. He is the author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea (Orbis Books; available from FOR).