How would a pacifist typically react to a Hitler, Adi Amin or Pol Pot?

Great Debates
21

I personally think there are three basic responses to evil/violence.

The first possible reaction is to meet violence with violence, the second is to do nothing, i.e. not to react at all. Those are the two most typical responses when discussions of pacifism comes up. I believe in a third choice - creative non-violent resistance which is really what Ghandi was all about. Many Mennonites, probably the guy the OP was talking about, believe in doing nothing at all - purist turn the other cheek philosophy.

The problem with the first response is that violent revolution tends to create the same conditions which were being fought against in the first place. And the path of turning the other cheek is problematic as it allows evil to run rampant without opposition.
The thing about the third creative way is that when I say creative - it must fit the situation. Ghandi succeeded because he knew his enemy. Those saying his techniques would not work against Hitler are probably correct. But I don’t think Ghandi would have necessarily employed the exact same techniques as he would be fighting a different type of enemy. It takes someone who knows the enemy very well, and Ghandi knew the British extremely well, to find what motivates them to change.

The thing is, people tend to not be very creative in their solutions. And it’s enormously difficult to get a group of people to act creatively and dedicately to a cause to effect change. But I believe this third creative way, if successful, is the best way to overcome evil and effect change.

22

Well put and applicable in thinking about current events. The concept of knowing your enemy is indeed a significant one. Finding a creative solution and then a consensus of people to pursue them is a monumental task. I pray we are up to the task.

23

Maybe. Do you think the british never considered having Gandhi killed of finding him guilty of treason and executing him? They didn’t choose not to because they were nicer than Hitler.

Here’s the catch. This is the leader who promotes non violent opposition. They wanted that because they didn’t see it as a threat. If they killed him a new more violent leader might arise.

24

This also plays a part in the story, since Nehru is portrayed as more of a pragmatist than Gandhi and is constantly saying that non-violent protest will not work against the Nazis, and that they must try something else. Of course, this just gets Nehru shot first in Turtledove’s story. I definitely recommend reading it if you ever get your hands on it.

25

That is not a good analogy. British tactics and German tactics differed widely because their goals were different. Under Hitler you were dead if you simply existed as demographic group deemed unworthy. He would have murdered all the Jews on every continent given the opportunity.

We are all of the Mennonite philosophy to a certain extent in that we believe killing is wrong and would not actively engage in it. Pacifists who are a targeted group would have to follow elucidator’s observation of human behavior or cease entirely. From a logical standpoint, it’s just as wrong to allow genocide if it is within your collective ability to stop it.

There is another alternative that pacifists never seem to consider. You don’t have to kill someone in war, you can simply try to wound them out of active service.

26

It’s hard to discuss this without mentioning religious belief. For some pacifists the act of killing someone amounts to losing their own soul. There’s an interesting story in the Book of Mormon in which a group of people had sworn never to take up arms against any man. The folks who sheltered them wound up fighting an enemy to defend this pacifist group. Eventually the next generation said. “We have sworn no oath” and joined in the fight.

We can choose to defend ourselves, our family, our country, and the weak and helpless, but we know that violence begats more violence.
Based strctly on principle I agree with you. It occurs to me that if Hitler was not stopped when he was that he would have developed the atomic bomb and jets and then the world could have fallen.

Pacifists are against all violence not just killing. In the movie Sargent York he was a pacifist and conscientious objector in WW I . He saw that the Bible said don’t kill.
When he was in combat he saw that he could save lives by winning the war as quickly as possible.

27

I suppose a pure pacifist living outside of Hitler’s Germany or Pol Pot’s Cambodia might seek to emigrate and organize nonviolent resistance “in their face”. (Not sure if you did or did not intend that the pacifist be understood to be living in the same place as the despot of choice)

You have to understand what power is: neither Hitler nor Pol Pot intrinsically possessed it, but rather instead it was granted to them by others in their general sphere of interaction. And those grants are not non-retractable. Power regimes have the ability to enforce what they command through coercion, but it becomes grossly inefficient and unweildy for them to do so perpetually, which is why they rely on their capacity to do so as a means of intimidating people into just doing as they are told in the first place. No regime has the capacity to coerce everyone at every turn in order to get its way… in fact, long before you would reach that point you would cease to have an identifiable regime in the first place.

To combat power, nonviolently or otherwise, you have to communicate effectively and motivate people. (If you want to stage a violent revolution against Pol Pot, for example, you’d better convince a few people to join you; and at some point, before or after you’ve offed the dude, you’d better convince a good portion of the administrative, military, law enforcement, and even general citizenry that it is in their best interests to consider you and ‘your side’ to be the New Boss or the True Voice of the People or whatever).

To go at it nonviolently, you have three general strategies at your disposal, which you can and should overlap as much as possible:

• Motivate the people ostensibly controlled by the evil despotic regime to withdraw their consent to be governed; convince them to be disobedient, even if only in bursts and en masse.

• Motivate the people ostensibly comprising the regime to drop out, or even to be less than fully enthusiastic in enforcing or otherwise doing the bidding of the regime; generate reluctance, foster hesitation, breed ambivalence.

• Motivate those people who are neither under the heels of the despotic regime nor participants in it to help gum up the works, to show up and contribute to disobedience, to help communicate, to offer support to the disobedient ones, and in particular to withdraw forms of cooperation from the despotic regime.

28

Who is the “you” you’re refering to. You didn’t specify anybody.

Good post though. Gandhi did work in Africa for quite a few years before then going home to India and working for another 20 years.

Dictators sometimes gain power by misrepresenting their purposes. I think after that they can lose support from within. I agree with the previous post that you have to know your enemy. They can oppress through intimidation but they have to allow enough of the basics to prevent open revolt.

There was that failed attempt to kill Hitler by his own generals. As resources are strained and the average citizen has to sacrifice more to support the whims of the leader unrest can lead to problems at home.

29

Not necessarily so. Pacifists aren’t even necessarily opposed to killing. A pacifist might accept violence (including killing) as an individual response to an immediate and direct threat, for instance.

He would then support self-defense but would refuse to fight in a war because it’s impersonnal (you’ve no reason to assume the individual you’re shooting at would want to harm you if you weren’t precisely shooting at him), the actual existence of a threat is unclear (contrarily to facing a guy who intend to slice your throat), said threat is generally not a life-or-death situation (the ennemy doesn’t intend to kill you if he wins the war, and only a threat to your life can justify killing someone) and so on…
I’ve met such people. Pacifists come in all shapes and forms.

30

You are correct. Thanks for the education. Thats why I enjoy the SDMB. :slight_smile:

31

Part of the reason, though, was because they were nicer than Hitler, or at least had a free press, a democratically elected government, and a tradition of due process and of equal rights. All of the human rights abuses and cruelty against peaceful protestors in India was reported on by the press and criticized by the British population. The same thing happened during the black civil right struggle led by Dr. King and the NAACP in America in the 50’s and 60’s. This didn’t happen in Nazi Germany, because it was a closed society that explicity denied human rights and equality, and discouraged free speech and a free press.

32

I think it’s too sweeping to assert that nonviolent resistance would necessarily fail against an enemy like the Nazis. In fact, there were isolated cases in WWII where united nonviolent resistance actually succeeded, in a limited way, against the Nazis themselves—e.g., in Denmark and in Le Chambon. It certainly didn’t defeat them militarily, but it did succeed in defeating some of their attempts at destruction and killing.

The thing about nonviolent resistance is that its direct effectiveness really depends upon numbers. A small group of pacifists resisting a large and brutal group of aggressors is simply going to wind up dead, although their martyrdom may well have a disproportionately huge indirect impact on popular opinion. But a small group of aggressors attacking a large, united group of pacifists (with anything less than a nuclear bomb, at least) isn’t going to get anywhere beyond killing a small minority of them. You simply can’t effectively dominate a mass of people who absolutely refuse to cooperate or collaborate with you in any way, even if you can manage to kill some of them with no violent retaliation.

33

You’ll have to clarify this a little. Are you saying that Jews and Gypsies in Denmark were not sent to death camps or are you referring to the underground railroad used to hide them? When the # 1 rule of domination is that there are no rules it is pretty easy to Blitzkrieg your way through a bunch of pacifists.

And I disagree that you can’t dominate a mass of people. Jews were worked to death in slave-labor camps. Non-cooperation was a bullet to the head. We’re not talking about polite wars where each side stops long enough to bury their dead. The debate subject specifically refers to monsters like Hitler where the bodies of dead slaves rotted on the side of the road, twisted grotesquely in the last throws of agony.

There’s a distinct line between ruling a group of people and dominating them. IMO you are talking about the difficulty ruling an uncooperative society. This is different than the brute force ability to dominate a society. The philosophical difference is that dominance requires no respect for human life.

34

That’s the kind perspective I was talking about. Wounding a soldier saves his life in the same vein as cutting off someone’s arm would if it was is caught in a feed auger.

35

First I’d like to go back to the OP and point out that there are some real large differences between Idi Amin and Pol Pot on one hand, and someone like Hitler or Stalin on the other. Remember, Hitler came to power in a Democratic government, pretty much telling everyone what he was all about. He was a bit vague on the specifics of his Final Solution, but getting those treacherous Jews out of the Fatherland was one of the key points of his public policy. Likewise he was going to make Germany great again with the implication that it would be happening to the detriment of Germany’s neighbors. Stalin enjoyed bragging that his constitution for the Soviet Union was the only Democratic constitution Russia had ever had.

Also, Germany and the Soviet Union were not regiemes that could be weakened by simply refusing to allow an arms trade to exist with them: both were modern industrial nations which produced large amounts of war materiel completely from their own resources.

A lot of the question of how a pacifist will react to an unjust and repressive regieme is going to depend as much upon the specific nature of the regieme as upon the specific nature of the pacifist in question. As clairobscur points out, there are lot of different stripes of pacifist, ranging through a whole spectrum of reactions and beliefs.

In Germany, for example, there were a number of people, even during the war, who continued to speak out as best they could against the actions of Hitler’s government and the SS. IIRC most of the public opposition ended up being sent to extermination and work camps like the Jews and Gypsys. However, the surviving writings of the people in such groups makes it pretty clear that this was not something they didn’t expect. Opposition in the Soviet Union was handled almost the same way, and it was still there, both violent and pacifist.

During WWII there were all sorts of ways for Conscientous Objectors to contribute, based upon their own beliefs. There were industries that were protected against the draft, even then, and even growing food would keep the industrial might of the US strong enough to support the war effort. I’m not sure, in a modern economy, it is possible to claim that any economic action isn’t going to support a nation’s military efforts in the kind of war that WWII had been.

Then there are those Conscientous Objectors who wouldn’t carry arms but were still included in combat units. IIRC there’s at least one Medal of Honor holder from Guadalcanal who was awarded the Medal for his courage in treating and saving other men in his unit.

It’s harder to say what should be done about a unfair regieme like that of an Idi Amin or a Pol Pot. During the disintergration of Yugoslavia, arms sales to the Balkans had been banned. But, since the factories in Serbia were still making large numbers of war materiel, this ban had the effect of leaving the people most at risk unarmed and unable to effectively defend themselves. OTOH, the supplying of arms to anyone willing to fight the Soviet backed puppet government in Afghanistan has helped create the chaos that is still going on there.

36

Gandhi was a lawyer, a wit, a politician, and a pacifist. One gets the impression that he didn’t always necessarily entirely mean what he said, but he said things for a reason.

For that reason, it’s not possible to be completely certain whether Gandhi meant everything he said.

With regard to Hitler, Gandhi advised the Allies to lay down their arms and resist only using non-violent means. His attitude was that even if the Nazis wiped you out, it was the Nazis who were putting their own souls at risk. On the other hand, once you were dead, you would benefit from the rewards of leading a righteous life. However, he doubted that the Nazis would get as far as wiping you out completely.

37

Magiver: IMO you are talking about the difficulty ruling an uncooperative society. This is different than the brute force ability to dominate a society.

But then domination, in the sense that you’re using it, is necessarily temporary. Sure, you can do whatever you like to a given bunch of people in the short term, if they refuse to retaliate violently. But as soon as you start needing them actually to do something for you, in order to carry on a viable society—that’s when non-violent non-cooperation can wreck your plans.

Mind you, I’m not arguing that nonviolent resistance, by itself, ever has systematically and conclusively defeated truly brutal and oppressive aggressors. I’m just skeptical of the claim that it intrinsically can’t.

As for the limited successes of nonviolent resistance against the Nazis, no, I’m not claiming that no Jews were killed in Denmark, just that the non-cooperation strategy of the Danes (like the similar one in Le Chambon, France) succeeded in saving a lot of them.

38

He said that but he probably didn’t mean it? :dubious:
Gandhi was a very spiritual man. In one book of his writings he tells of hearing what he described as the voice of God while he was in prison. He didn’t say this to claim any authority. He didn’t make any attempts to convince anybody. He simply stated what he believed.
His advice to the Europeans sounds remarkably similar to what Quakers believe.
A question that occurs to me is how many German soilders would continue to kill people who refused to fight back and offered no resistance.
My Dad was in WWII. He said when people shot at him he shot back and never thought about them being a person like himself. Toward the end of the war groups of Germans were surrendering. Looking into the eyes of these unarmed men he realized they were just people the same as him who wanted to go home and be with their families. Not all German soilders were sadistic monsters.
Watching the movie Gandhi I was struck by the incredible courage of the people who took blows for what they believed in and offered none in return. It’s possible that the army German soilder may have become some of the uncooperative.
While the violence is going back and forth it’s hard to see the cruelty involved. It seems “fair”. If it’s all one sided then the cruelty becomes undeniable and the people on the side of cruelty must ask themseleves “Is that what we’re about?”

39

I definitely did not say that.

But that’s not the entirety of what he was. He was a very clever, ambitious, crafty, stubborn, and self-righteous man as well. With regard to some “spiritual” matters (specifically, regarding sexuality), it is my belief that he was a deeply disturbed and deluded man.

I didn’t say that he was not being sincere. I said that there is reason to believe that not everything Gandhi said should be taken literally.

I, for one, do not hold the belief that Gandhi’s motives and means were entirely pure. He was a human being with specific goals. That should be taken into context.

40

That makes sense. As humans we all struggle with ego and the motivations we don’t acknowledge.

What is it you think he was deeply deluded about?