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Orwell, Pacifism, Pacifists

Lawrence Rosenwald
Wellesley College

Orwell’s honesty demands a comparable honesty, or at least an attempt at it, on the part of anyone venturing to write about him. So I'll begin this essay on Orwell and pacifism by making clear the standpoint from which I’m writing it. I’m a long-time pacifist, and a fairly extreme one – a war tax resister, and a member of the War Resisters League, whose creed is that “war [is] a crime against humanity.” I’m also a long-time admirer of Orwell, not just for his honesty but also for his unhampered perception, his “power of facing unpleasant facts”,¹ and his sympathy with the feelings and judgments of “ordinary decent people.” And I’m aware that these two commitments of mine are at odds with each other, and that Orwell was, for much of his life, a relentless critic of pacifists, both politically and ethically.

Now my pacifism is probably more deep-rooted than my admiration for Orwell, and if I had to give up one or the other, it’s the pacifism I’d strive to hold on to. But the goal of this essay is not to defend pacifism against Orwell's critiques. It’s rather to find the ideas in Orwell’s remarks about pacifism that pacifists can use – the ideas expressed both in his abundant critiques, and in his occasional praises. The Yiddish proverb says, ver’s shmeykhlt iz a faynd, ver’s shtroft iz a fraynd – “enemies smile, friends rebuke.” In that sense, Orwell is a great friend to pacifism, and my essay is an exploration of the ideas his friendship yielded.

I

In the late 30s, Orwell was a consistent opponent of war. His opposition was largely on socialist grounds: that wars were fought in the interests of “the moneyed classes,” and that opposing those classes meant opposing their wars. In 1937, for example, reviewing a pacifist manifesto called The Men I Killed, by Brigadier-General F. P. Crozier, Orwell vigorously stated “the two facts... which should be made the centre of all anti-war agitation”:

1. That war against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

2. That every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac (“militarist” Germany in 1914, “Fascist” Germany next year or the year after).²

He wrote an anti-war pamphlet in 1938; it’s now lost (1:357), but presumably it included among its arguments the claim Orwell made in a 1938 letter to the New English Weekly, that “modern war is a racket” (1:332). Even as late as 1939, when the nature of Hitler’s fascism was clear to him, he was still adventurously conspiring with Herbert Read to procure material and supplies for an anti-war printing press, against the time when such presses would be made illegal (1:378).

Even at this time, though, it’s pretty clear that Orwell doesn’t like pacifists – in much the same way that, in The Road to Wigan Pier, he holds socialist principles but doesn’t like socialists. He praises General Crozier’s pacifist book partly because it refutes “the widespread notion that every pacifist is a Creeping Jesus” (1:283) – a notion Orwell clearly shares.³ He regards the central task, for those committed to “producing an effective anti-war movement in England,” as being that “of mobilising the dislike of war that undoubtedly exists in ordinary decent people, as opposed to the hack-journalists and the pansy left” (332). Paraphrasing and extrapolating from these two phrases, we might say that what Orwell doesn’t like about pacifists before the war is that they’re sanctimonious, hypocritical, abject, elitist, and not masculine enough.

II

Orwell ceased being of the anti-war party in 1939, when England entered the war. He explains his shift of position in a candid, complex 1940 essay, “My Country Right or Left”; he reveals there both a new political analysis and new motives.

The analysis is stated simply: “there is no real alternative between resisting Hitler and surrendering to him, and from a Socialist point of view I should say that it is better to resist” (1: 539). It rests, however, on Orwell's complicated belief in “the possibility of building a Socialist on the bones of a Blimp, the power of one kind of loyalty to transmute itself into another” (1: 540). That is: for Orwell to support the war "from a Socialist point of view," he must believe that fighting for England against Hitler can be made to be part of the same process as fighting against “Chamberlain’s England” for “the England of tomorrow,” i.e., a socialist England. He must, that is, believe that the socialist principles that had previously led him to oppose wars can now be realized by supporting one.⁴

The motives are more complicated, and probably more important; they have to do with character, with psychological style. Supporting the war lets Orwell acknowledge and deploy traits of character and deeply held aspirations that being against the war would suppress, and which he already believes pacifists characteristically lack: toughness, fitness, masculinity, what Orwell calls “vastness of... experience” (1:538). This last is especially interesting, because Orwell associates it with the veterans of World War I – that is, with men who fought in a war that he is not justifying as a struggle against fascism. For this particular virtue, it seems, any war will do. And in the essay’s final sentence Orwell writes of “the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has been found” (1: 540). Again, this argument is almost independent of the political one; the “spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues” would presumably exist even without the threat posed by Hitler.

III

Once engaged in the war effort, Orwell turned against pacifism and pacifists with a vengeance. Like the reflections in “My Country Right or Left,” some of his critiques are political, some are psychological and ethical. The principal ones are as follows:

1) As noted, pacifism amounts to capitulation: “there’s no real choice between resisting Hitler and surrendering to him” (1:539).

2) Pacifism is not only capitulation, it is in fact “objectively pro-Nazi” (2:167). Orwell says this first in a 1941 review of Alexander Comfort’s novel, No Such Liberty. But his clearest explanation of it comes in a celebrated 1942 debate in Partisan Review, in which “objectively” is explained as meaning something like “in effect if not in intention.” In responding to a mean-spirited letter from the pacifist poet D. S. Savage, Orwell writes:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one.⁵ In practice, “he that is not with me is against me.” . . . Mr. Savage remarks that “according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be ‘objectively pro-British.’” But of course he would be! (2: 226)

Moreover, Orwell argues, the net effect of pacifism in the struggle between a democratic state and a fascist one will be in favor of the latter: “in so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism” (2: 226).

3) Pacifism is intellectually “irresponsible” (2:89), because pacifists can’t imagine running things. Orwell writes this in 1940, in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” and expands it in a 1941 letter to the Reverend Iorwerth Jones, clarifying certain points in that work:

Government cannot be conducted on “pure” pacifist lines, because any government which refused in all circumstances to use force could be overthrown by anyone, even any individual, who was willing to use force. Pacifism refuses to face the problem of government and pacifists think always as people who will never be in a position of control, which is why I call them irresponsible. (2:111)

Those are the chief political critiques. They’re important, clearly. But they don't feel as important as the psychological and ethical critiques, the critiques Orwell directs against pacifist character.

4) Of these, the first is the one already noted, that pacifists characteristically lack certain important virtues and emotions: patriotism, courage, comradely solidarity, suffering, self-sacrifice. Orwell states this view most vividly in a couple of passages in which he’s attempting, interestingly enough, to explain why “ordinary decent people” are attracted to Hitler. In a 1940 review of Mein Kampf, for example, he writes,

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. (3: 14; see also 3:141)⁶

5) Pacifists are unwilling to make a distinction of value between Nazi Germany and 1941 England. They’re guilty of a false moral relativism.

6) Worse still: to the extent that pacifists do make sharp moral distinctions, they direct their critiques more against democracies than against totalitarianisms. In other words, pacifists are pro-Nazi not just objectively but also subjectively. Thus in 1942 Orwell writes, “with the out-and-out, turn-the-other-cheek pacifists you come upon the much stranger phenomenon of people who have started by renouncing violence ending by championing Hitler” (2: 180). Again, in a 1944 letter to the noted pacifist John Middleton Murry: “many remarks you have made in recent years seem to me to imply that you don’t object to violence if it is violent enough. And you certainly seem or seemed to me to prefer the Nazis to ourselves, at least so long as they appeared to be winning” (3:185; see also 3:8).

Orwell dislikes this not just because it amounts to being on the side of great evil, but also because it reveals pacifists as hypocrites and cowards. The correspondence with Murry provides the most vivid examples: “you are wrong,” he writes, “in thinking that I dislike wholehearted pacifism, though I do think it mistaken. What I object to is the circumspect kind of pacifism which denounces one kind of violence while endorsing or avoiding mention of another” (3:191). Later he develops the point:

A courageous pacifist would not simply say “Britain ought not to bomb Germany.” Anyone can say that. He would say, “The Russians should let the Germans have the Ukraine, the Chinese should not defend themselves against Japan, the European peoples should submit to the Nazis, the Indians should not try to drive out the British.” Real pacifism would involve all of that: but one can’t say that kind of thing and also keep on good terms with the rest of the intelligentsia.⁷ It is because they consistently avoid mentioning such issues as these, while continuing to squeal against obliteration bombing etc, that I find the majority of English pacifists so difficult to respect. (3:204).⁸

7) Orwell claims repeatedly that pacifism is attractive only to people in sheltered positions (3:89, 3: 111, 3: 170). This by itself might simply be an empirical claim: that pacifists tend to be people living in safe places, e.g., in nations with effective armies, nations not often subject to invasion, nations separated from other nations by large bodies of water; that pacifists tend to be people in soft economic situations, members of the comfortable middle class. Clearly the claim is more than that, though. The fact that pacifists are sheltered means to Orwell that their authenticity in political debate is compromised. The suggestion is, “pacifists are people who haven’t faced the unpleasant facts of life, either economically or politically; if they did face those facts, they wouldn’t be pacifists for long.”

8) Pacifists are also sheltered intellectually; being a pacifist, says Orwell, requires not knowing what you’re living on. “Rightly hating violence, [pacifists] do not wish to recognise that it is integral to modern society and that their own fine feelings and noble attitudes are all the fruit of injustice backed up by force. They do not want to learn where their incomes come from” (2: 170 ; see also 2:187).

IV

Those are Orwell’s principal charges against British pacifism and pacifists during the war. This seems the right place, then, to assess them historically – to ask, that is, how accurately British pacifism and pacifists are described by them.

One of the charges, though, doesn’t need to be assessed, because Orwell withdrew it. The charge in question is the famous one, that pacifism is “objectively pro-Nazi.” That charge is quoted frequently, and for the most part without any reference to Orwell’s change of position, so it’s important to describe that change clearly.⁹ It is announced in December of 1944. Orwell is writing about propaganda, and he sees “the same mental atmosphere” everywhere: “nobody is searching for the truth, everybody is putting forward a ‘case’ with complete disregard for fairness or accuracy, and the most plainly obvious facts can be ignored by those who don’t want to see them” (3:288). Then, with remarkable generosity, he takes as an example of this mental atmosphere his own use of the word “objectively”:

I draw attention to one very widespread controversial habit – disregard of an opponent’s motives. The key-word here is “objectively.”

We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are “objectively” aiding the Nazis: and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once....

This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. (3:289)

Orwell withdraws the charge for two reasons, then: it’s “dishonest,” which is a very bad thing to be in Orwell’s lexicon, and it leads to a sharply limited view of the world, in which motives are disregarded and actions harder to understand.

In the charges that remain, Orwell seems to me significantly wrong about most British pacifists. But he is also significantly right about them; and the pacifists he’s most right about are the ones I myself most care about and most resemble, namely, pacifist intellectuals – who are also the ones that pacifism most needs if it’s to become a vital political position.

One aspect of British pacifism Orwell is wrong about is its demography. Many British pacifists, in particular many prominent British pacifists, were women. Reading Orwell, it’s impossible to see that. He never refers to a woman pacifist, never engages one in debate. Moreover, many British pacifists came to pacifism through religious belief. Orwell mentions a few of these, notably Canon Dick Shepard, the founder of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), but religious pacifism isn't something he's really interested in.

There’s a revealing exchange about this in the Partisan Review debate. D. S. Savage writes, “[Orwell] sees pacifism primarily as a political phenomenon. That is just what it isn’t. Primarily it is a moral phenomenon. Political movements are based on programme and organisation. With pacifism, programme and organisation are quite subsidiary. Pacifism springs from conscience – i.e., from within the individual human being” (2:221). Savage is smugly self-contented here, but he’s not wrong, especially if we substitute for “moral” the less guarded word “religious.” Orwell, though, dismisses the question, writing frankly, “I am not interested in pacifism as a ‘moral phenomenon’” (2:226). He needn’t be, of course, to argue against a pacifist political program; but his lack of interest compromises his accounts of pacifist character.¹¹

Orwell is also significantly wrong about much pacifist behavior. For one thing, British pacifists were less aggressive than he makes them seem; Martin Ceadel, one of the leading historians of British pacifism, points out that “the good reputation of the peace movement was finally assured by the generally self-effacing wartime behavior of both the [Peace Pledge Union]... and the conscientious objectors... of 1939-1945.”¹² British pacifists were respectable, well-spoken, sometimes persons of distinction. Some, during the so-called “Phony War,” took actions to hinder the war effort: they propagandized against the war, breached the Defence Regulations by publicly urging men to refuse to fight, picketed outside local employment exchanges where men were registering for the draft. They also counseled potential and actual conscientious objectors. That’s about as far as their anti-war work went, though. They certainly were not doing Berrigan-style civil disobedience. They weren’t, for the most part, doing civil disobedience at all.¹³

As the war continued and intensified, moreover, pacifists and conscientious objectors did less to oppose the war and more to support their neighbors and, in non-combatant ways, their neighbors’ war.¹⁴ They established “a rest centre where evacuees from Liverpool could sleep”;¹⁵ supported German refugees, some of them interned as enemy aliens; were guinea pigs in medical research; created small agricultural communities; got involved “in a number of pressure-group efforts concerned with mitigating the effects of war,”¹⁶ bearing in particular on the famines created by blockades and on saturation bombing; launched the Food Relief Campaign in 1941 that later gave rise to Oxfam). Some were working on farms and doing forestry work. Some were doing non-combatant military services, notably in the Friends Ambulance Unit. Peter Brock and Nigel Young sum up the situation as follows:

One should not turn to absolutists to find the representative type of [conscientious] objector. One must look rather to those who worked on the land as farm laborers or in forestry units or as market gardeners, to those who served in the understaffed hospitals as porters, orderlies or ambulance drivers, to those who chose civil defense or the Auxiliary Fire Service as the field of their alternative service, or those engaged in social work of the kind carried on, for instance, by privately organized Pacifist Service Units among the depressed sections of the population in large industrial cities like London, Liverpool, Manchester or Cardiff.¹⁷

The people doing these activities could not be justly described as objectively or subjectively pro-Nazi. They were not moral relativists, they neither worshipped power nor preferred totalitarianism to democracy, they did useful work for England.

On the other hand, though, there’s little in the history of these pacifists to suggest that they had an answer for Orwell’s charges against pacifism as a political program. They were not figuring out what it might mean to resist Hitler but not to fight him. They were not imagining how pacifists might govern. They were often sheltered and comfortable people.¹⁸ The forms of pacifism they devised during the war did not for the most part expose them to the challenges faced by soldiers, and did not therefore cultivate the virtues that Orwell found lacking in pacifism as a way of life. Andrew Rigby writes persuasively that “there can have been few pacifists who had not experienced periods of doubt about their stance, some degree of shame that they were avoiding the pain and discomfort that others in the services were facing, some concern that maybe they had no non-violent answer to the Nazi aggression other than ‘peace at any price’.”¹⁹

Moreover, and depressingly, the British pacifist intellectuals whom Orwell is really thinking of when he refers to “pacifists” deserve most of the censures he directs against them. (They’re also flagrantly rude when engaging Orwell in debate; it’s amazing that so many of them remained friends with him.) Alexander Comfort, for example, is in fact a moral relativist, or at any rate the unironized narrator of his novel is:

Looking out across London, I knew that all the talk of strength I heard and all the assurances of the popular songs, as I came to understand them, how happy and strong and right and cultured you are, were the same as the assurances that I’d left plastered on the complaining walls of Cologne by the Rhine, and that they’d blossom the same things – injustice and enormity. It’s not that you of London are evil; it’s not that the infection has gone so far that you beat and jail men, individual men, who tell you that the bacteria of your disease are there. But they are there. And I know that they must, and they will grow, till you are as we, and fear has redoubled itself.²⁰

D. S. Savage is in fact an admirer of Hitler: “Whereas the rest of the nation is content with calling down obloquy on Hitler’s head, we regard this as superficial. Hitler requires, not condemnation, but understanding. This does not mean that we like, or defend him. Personally I do not care for Hitler... there would be a profound justice, I feel, however terrible, in a German victory” (2: 222). That’s just plain nauseating. A young pacifist Orwell records meeting in the Café Royal, in 1940, an aspiring painter, is simultaneously foolish, cowardly, and self-serving (3:131-32).²¹ Stuart Morris, for a while the general secretary of the PPU, joined an undercover Nazi organization called The Link. "It is hard,” writes David Lukowitz, “to escape the conclusion that there was too much sympathy [among PPU pacifists] for the German position, often the product of ignorance and superficial thinking. There was also a complete failure to grasp the nature of. . . Germany’s policies with regard to colonies, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. . . [and] the . . . ruthless spirit. . . of the Nazi state."²²

All of which is to say that though British pacifists are a rather different group than Orwell presents them as being, they do not offer a satisfactory model for someone who’s trying, at this present moment, to imagine a stronger pacifism, a pacifism that can stand up to Orwell’s charges.

V

For that we need to look at Gandhi’s work, and at the striking change in Orwell’s view of it, from harsh to almost sentimental. In 1941, Orwell regards Gandhi’s nonviolence as cooperation with the British empire. He writes in a letter that “it was always admitted in the most cynical way that Gandhi made it easier for the British to rule India, because his influence was always against taking any action that would make any difference” (2:111). In 1942, he claims, “it always makes me shout with laughter to hear . . .Gandhi named as an example of the success of nonviolence” (2:227). He thinks Gandhi is insufficiently anti-fascist, i.e., insufficiently in support of the Allied cause: “Gandhi would certainly advise us to let the Germans rule here rather than fight against them – in fact he did advocate just that. And if Hitler conquered England he would, I imagine, try to bring into being a nation-wide pacifist movement, which would prevent serious resistance and therefore make it easier for [Hitler] to rule” (2: 112).²³ Orwell also thinks that Gandhi is a hypocrite: “rejection of the machine is, of course, always founded on tacit acceptance of the machine, a fact symbolised by Gandhi as he plays with his spinning-wheel in the mansion of some cotton millionaire” (2: 312). And he goes so far as to acknowledge “a sort of apocalyptic truth in the statement of the German radio that the teachings of Hitler and Gandhi are the same” (2: 315).

By 1949, though, when Orwell wrote the “Reflections on Gandhi,” everything seems to have changed. Maybe the change was in Orwell’s mood, with the ending of the war letting him generously re-examine old judgments. Maybe it was the developments in Gandhi’s career, and the astonishing liberation of India. Maybe it was just Orwell’s open-minded reading, and in part re-reading, of Gandhi’s remarkable autobiography. Whatever the cause, though, "Reflections on Gandhi" is one of the sanest, most challenging, and most generous essays ever written about a great pacifist.

Orwell admires Gandhi because he finds him so unlike the pacifists of England. He likes Gandhi’s honesty, for one thing. He likes his physical fearlessness. He likes his worldly intelligence: “inside the saint... there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman” (4: 463).²⁴ Orwell also likes the fact that Gandhi, unlike the pacifists Orwell accuses of moral relativism, “was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not – indeed, since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not – take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins” (4: 468). And, in a sentence that comes as close to being sentimental as anything I can recall in Orwell’s work, he praises Gandhi’s ability to regard human beings as individuals: “even when he was fighting what was in effect a colour war he did not think of people in terms of race or status. The governor of a province, a cotton millionaire,²⁵ a half-starved Dravidian coolie, a British private soldier, were all equally human beings, to be approached in much the same way” (4: 464).

Maybe it’s because of this personal admiration that Orwell is willing to make several extraordinary concessions in judging Gandhi’s pacifism. First, he admits the possibility that Gandhi’s pacifism can be separated out from the rest of his views. That admission is crucial. If one can be a Gandhian pacifist only by adhering to the whole of Gandhi's ethical program, then Gandhian pacifism hasn’t much of a future, because the demands on the potential pacifist are too great: no meat, no milk, no alcohol, no tobacco, no spices or condiments, no sex except for procreation, no sexual desire, no particular friendships. Nor is it just that these demands are too great; they’re also repellent. As Erik Erikson writes in his great letter to the then long-dead Gandhi,

it is important to affirm unequivocally that what you call Satyagraha must not remain restricted to ascetic men and women who believe that they can overcome violence only by sexual self-disarmament. For the danger of a riotous return to violence always remains at least latent if we do not succeed in imbuing essential daily experiences with a Satyagraha-of-everyday-life.²⁶

It would have been easy for Orwell to argue that Gandhi’s views come all together or not at all, and then to argue that as a collected set they need to be rejected. In fact, though, he argues precisely the contrary: “Gandhi’s pacifism can be separated to some extent from his other teachings. Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was a definite technique, a method, capable of producing desired political results” (467).

A second concession: it’s a common claim that, as Orwell put it, Gandhi “did not understand the nature of totalitarianism” (4:468). Orwell agrees with that claim, but he makes it in an unusual way. For him, the point isn’t that the British treated Gandhi “forbearingly” (or, conversely, that a totalitarian government would have shot Gandhi out of hand); it’s rather that, in British India, “[Gandhi] was always able to command publicity” (4: 468). That means that for Orwell, the question of whether Gandhian nonviolence could have an effect in a totalitarian society can be answered empirically, and on a case-by-case basis, rather than categorically and once and for all.

Finally: an important critique of pacifism is that it doesn’t have a strategy of intervention – or, in Orwell’s language, “applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement” (4:469). Orwell might have used that critique to dismiss Gandhi’s work. In fact, though, he doesn’t. Rather he backs off, and seems willing to wonder what strategies of pacifist intervention Gandhi might have devised, and willing to admit that they might have been useful:

These and other kindred questions need discussion, and need it urgently, in the few years left to us before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly. It seems doubtful whether civilisation can stand another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence. It is Gandhi’s virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind of question that I have raised above... One feels of him that there was much that he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking. (4: 469)²⁷

The essay on Gandhi reveals the extent to which Orwell’s critiques of pacifism are personal. When he’s dealing with pacifists whom he doesn’t respect, he doesn’t respect pacifism either. When he’s dealing with Gandhi, with a pacifist whom he does respect, he thinks pacifism is worth consideration. It’s as if he were saying, to paraphrase his great brief summary of Dickens’s political philosophy, “’If [pacifists] would behave decently [pacifism] would be worth taking seriously” (1:428).

VI

Which leaves only the final and crucial questions: does the history of pacifism, the pacifism preceding Orwell and the pacifism following him as well as the pacifism he himself observed, offer satisfactory responses to the full range of his critiques of it?²⁸ If it does, how does that help us to identify what traditions of pacifism are most alive? If it doesn’t, how does that help us to identify what tasks pacifists need to set themselves?

1) Orwell’s right: there’s no choice between resisting Hitler and surrendering to him. That doesn’t mean, though, that resisting Hitler, that resisting evil generally, needs to be violent. What Orwell is contemplating in Gandhi is the idea that certain nonviolent practices can be formidably resistant, as uncompromising as battle. (This is an idea that western pacifists learned from Gandhi, and often didn’t like learning; Gandhian resistance seemed to them excessively coercive, too close to violence for comfort.²⁹) The sit-ins and jail-ins and boycotts of the American civil rights movement, which was strongly influenced by Gandhi, are forms of coercion. When Denise Levertov writes of peace as being “an energy field more intense than war,” it’s perhaps this Gandhian mode of nonviolent resistance that she has in mind. And developing this mode of resistance is the chief aim of Gene Sharp’s ambitious three-volume work, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, in the preface to which Sharp writes,

it appeared evident that both moral injunctions against violence and exhortations in favor of love and nonviolence have made little or no contribution to ending war and major political violence. It seemed to me that only the adoption of a substitute type of sanction and struggle as a functional alternative to violence in acute conflicts. . . could possibly lead to a major reduction of political violence in a manner compatible with freedom, justice and human dignity.³⁰

But then: can that resistance work against totalitarian regimes? As noted, Orwell puts this question undogmatically; but he does put it. So it’s important here to evoke the admittedly few but quite thought-provoking stories of nonviolent resistance practiced against, precisely, Hitler’s Nazis and those under their control. The most celebrated of these took place in the French village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, the inhabitants of which saved 5,000 Jews from deportation and the death camps. The inhabitants' motives remain enigmatic; their pastors, though, were avowed pacifists, who encouraged their congregations to employ “les armes de l’esprit,” the weapons of the spirit, and the actual resistance and rescuing in Chambon were in fact conducted nonviolently.³¹ A still more telling example, because geographically closer to the center of Nazi power, was the 1943 protest conducted in Berlin. Non-Jewish women whose Jewish husbands had been taken into custody assembled on the Rosenstrasse, by the collection center where their husbands were being held before being deported. The women numbered anywhere between 600 and 6,000. They chanted, simply, “give us our husbands back.” They were threatened with machine guns, they stood their ground, they yelled “murderer, murderer, murderer.” And in the end, 2,000 of the imprisoned Jews were freed and were allowed to survive till the end of the war – partly because, as Nathan Stoltzfus points out, the protest was so public, so successful at, in Orwell’s phrase, “commanding publicity.”³²

2) It’s not true, in the long history of pacifism, that pacifists as a group “do not want to learn where their incomes come from.” Certainly some pacifists haven’t; a recent letter from a pacifist friend very forthrightly complains of this: “the peace movement, for the most part, wants to have its cake and eat it too. They by and large refuse to recognize their own complicity.”³³ But Orwell’s point, that pacifists’ fine feelings, noble attitudes, gracious lifestyles “are all the fruit of injustice backed up by force,” is in fact a point that pacifists themselves have often made, especially those pacifists for whom nonviolence is not a tactic but a way of life.

The history of pacifism includes a tradition of voluntary poverty, poverty chosen at least in part because pacifists have in fact have found out where their incomes come from, and then striven to be bound as little as possible to those sources. This was certainly true of Gandhi, and of many people influenced by him. (Orwell does not comment on this aspect of Gandhi’s program.) It was true of the 18th-century American pacifist John Woolman, was and is true of the Catholic Worker pacifists from Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin down to the present day, is true of many American pacifists practicing war tax resistance, both religious and secular. Attend any gathering of war tax resisters, and you’ll find people fretting about every detail of their getting and spending, imagining or practicing alternative economies, devising ways out of the cash nexus, finding sources for clothing other than sweatshops; you’ll also find people who, with something of Henry David Thoreau’s handyman virtuosity, make things rather than buying them or hold things in common rather than individually - clothing, gardens, houses, land – precisely out of an acute discomfort with “where their incomes come from.”

That may not be what Orwell wanted, of course. His critique seems intended to push pacifists away from pacifism rather than towards voluntary poverty.³⁴ But a great strength of the pacifist movement, in my view, is precisely this perception, which it shares with Orwell, that it’s important to know where the money that you spend is coming from, and equally important, if it turns out that it’s all “the fruit of injustice backed up by force,” to make as sparing and judicious a use of it as possible.

3) This same tradition of voluntary poverty, combined with a far more militant tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience than anything Orwell’s British pacifists were conducting, offers something of an answer to Orwell’s more general charge that pacifists are “sheltered,” and perhaps the beginning of an answer to his charge that being a pacifist does not allow the exercise of the military virtues. Such an answer is famously articulated in Williams James’s 1910 pacifist essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in which James, anticipating Orwell’s language, argues that “a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature . . . would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace”.³⁵

Other pacifists have imagined other ways of bringing those virtues into play. The extreme voluntary poverty called for by Dorothy Day, the risks undergone by Gandhian activists in India and by civil rights workers in the American South, the beatings and sometimes fatal attacks they suffered, the time they spent in prison, the time spent in prison by ultra-resisters during the Viet Nam War and the campaigns against nuclear weapons, the risks undergone, and sometimes succumbed to, by those who’ve done accompaniment in Latin America and the Middle East, worked against timber companies in the Northwest, been “human shields” in Iraq – whatever judgment one might make of the wisdom or folly of taking these risks, whatever one thinks of voluntary poverty and privation as a way of conducting a life, it’s clear that pacifists who purposely expose themselves to risk, to pain, to poverty, to assault and death can’t be justly described as “sheltered,” and are able to, are in fact forced to, deploy some of the military virtues Orwell is talking about, have need of courage and solidarity and camaraderie and self-sacrifice. And in developing those virtues, they seem to me pacifism’s best answer to Orwell’s critique of it in this regard.

4) A difficult charge of Orwell’s to answer is one that he expressed somewhat tentatively, towards the end of the reflections on Gandhi: “how does one put [nonviolent resistance] into practice internationally? . . . Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement” (4:469). What Orwell is talking about is the difficulty of nonviolent intervention. It is possible, that is, to imagine, and has been possible in some cases to carry out, nonviolent resistance against one’s own government, against an occupying army, even when the government or the army is part of totalitarian regime. But suppose what you want to do is to defend, not yourself, but someone else, someone far away. Suppose – to take an obvious and pressing example – that what you had wanted to do, as a pacifist in January of 2003, was both oppose US military action against Iraq and intervene nonviolently on behalf of the oppressed Iraqi people.

That’s hard; violence has a long history of having large effects at a distance, whereas the great triumphs of nonviolence have been local and intimate. But there have been hints of what pacifist intervention would look like. Orwell’s British pacifists had begun to discuss the practice that is now called accompaniment. They proposed, for example, the idea of a “Peace Army,” to be “recruited from volunteers ready to stand without weapons between the opposing forces . . . [This] emerged in 1932 at the time of the Sino-Japanese conflict over Manchuria.”³⁶ But nothing came of it. Again, “at the time of the Munich crisis, the PPU sponsors offered to send five thousand pacifists to the Sudetenland as a nonviolent presence.”³⁷ Nothing came of that either. Today we have the pacifist interventions of Peace Brigades International, and now, with greater risk, those of the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine. It’s too early to say whether anything will come of these attempts, I think. They may turn out, in retrospect, to have been the fumbling beginnings of a great human invention; they may turn out to have been steps down a dead-end street. In either case, whatever tradition of pacifism ends up offering the best answer to Orwell’s charge here will also end up, I think, being the tradition of pacifism that has the longest future and greatest influence.

5) Two of Orwell’s charges remain, both bearing on the relations pacifists might have with the nations they live in: the charge that pacifists can’t govern, can’t even imagine governing, and the charge that they can’t feel patriotism.

A modest answer to the first question would rest on the fact that many pacifists, even War Resisters League pacifists, are willing to make a distinction between police force and state military force, accepting the former and rejecting the latter. Those who make such a distinction can imagine governing, within the domestic sphere, in a quite familiar way. They would, of course, need to conduct foreign policy rather differently! But the business of arresting murderers and drug dealers would proceed as usual.

Other pacifists are less easy about police force; they refuse, for example, to call the police even when personally threatened. How such pacifists would face the problem of governing is less clear. It’s possible that they would admit the truth of Orwell’s charge, but suggest that it bears on governing large states rather than small communities, in which it’s easier to see how militant nonviolence could be an adequate substitute for militant violence; pacifism then would lead to a critique of large states, precisely as requiring violence to maintain. In doing so, it would ally itself with the decentralist tradition associated with E. F. Schumacher.

A modest answer to the second question is that pacifists could be patriots in pacifist states; if the first question could be answered, that is, the answer to the second question would follow. A more challenging answer would agree with Orwell that pacifism and patriotism are in fact at odds. Pacifists have for the most part refused to make a distinction, not between good and wicked states, but between the value of one human life and another – in particular, between the value of a fellow citizen’s life and the life of a citizen belonging to one’s country’s antagonist. How do you know, asks the Talmud, whether your enemy’s blood is less red than yours? Maybe it’s just as red, or even redder! But patriotism often rests on this distinction. And as Susan Sontag writes in a recent Nation article, “it is hard to defy the wisdom of the tribe, the wisdom that values the lives of members of the tribe above all others. It will always be unpopular – it will always be deemed unpatriotic – to say that the lives of the members of the other tribe are as valuable as one’s own.”³⁸

I’m not claiming that the modes of pacifism I present as offering responses to Orwell’s charges are, at the moment, pacifism’s dominant modes. I’m not claiming that the responses they offer are entirely satisfactory. I am claiming that if we who cherish pacifism take Orwell’s charges seriously, and in considering them take a long, eclectic look at pacifist history, we can find in certain traditions of that history some compelling answers to his charges; and that we may want to conclude that those traditions are, precisely because they can provide such answers, the traditions that might nurture a stronger pacifism than the one Orwell knew, and the one we have now.

Footnotes

¹Quoted and well commented on in Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (New York: Basic Books), p. 13.

²Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters (Jaffrey, New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 2000; orig. pub. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1:283. Sources for subsequent quotations from this edition will be given by parenthetical citation in the body of the text.

³The shorter OED defines "creeping Jesus" as “an abject or hypocritical person.”

⁴Later Orwell candidly acknowledged he’d been wrong in this belief, and in the predictions accompanying it; but looking around him in 1944, he was not distressed by what he saw: “The fact that we were fighting for our lives has not forced us to ‘go Socialist,’ as I foretold that it would, but neither has it driven us into Fascism. So far as I can judge, we are somewhat further from Fascism than we were at the beginning of the war” (3:295).

⁵It’s not clear how much of Orwell’s sense of pacifism is dependent on his being situated “in a war like this one,” i.e., in a war in which an enemy comparable in power to one’s own country has in fact physically attacked that country. It’s good to remind oneself, though, that that’s the sort of war England was in fact involved in; such a reminder should at least slow down the process of claiming Orwell in support of any war that is distinctly not “like this one.”

⁶Such passages almost justify Alexander Comfort’s sarcastic remark, that Orwell was “the preacher of a doctrine of Physical Courage as an Asset to the left-wing intellectual” (2:225).

⁷Note the implication, in the phrase “the rest of the intelligentsia,” that pacifists are themselves members of that group. On Orwell’s tendency to talk of “pacifists” when what he really has in mind is pacifist intellectuals, see below, ***.

⁸Orwell’s respect for “wholehearted pacifists” seems to embrace not just pacifists who denounce all state violence, but even pacifists who support the Nazis, if only their pacifism is purged of what he regards as its “forensic” character, its evasiveness. If pacifists admit that they are helping the Nazis, he writes in 1941, “then the long-term case for pacifism can be made out. You can say: ‘Yes, I know I am helping Hitler, and I want to help him. Let him conquer Britain, the USSR and America. Let the Nazis rule the world; in the end they will grow into something different.’ That is at any rate a tenable position. It looks forward into human history, beyond the term of our own lives” (2:169).

⁹E.g., Roger Kimball, “Failures of Nerve,” The New Criterion 21:3, November 2002,
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/nov02/aa-kimball.htm; Jonah Goldberg, “Safire’s Courage,” National Review Online, 1/7/02,
http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg010702.shtml; Michael Kelly, “Pacifists are not Serious People,” Washington Post 9/26/01, http://www.townhall.com/columnists/michaelkelly/mk20010926.shtml.

¹⁰On women pacifists see Josephine Eglin, “Women Pacifists in Interwar Britain,” in Peter Brock and Thomas Socknat eds., Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

¹¹In 1945, Orwell does write that “the majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point” (3:374). That, though, is the only passage I’m aware of in which he acknowledges this. It’s a grudging acknowledgment, too; presumably by “obscure religious sects” Orwell means Quakers, among others, but why, given the strong history of British Quakerism, does he call them “obscure”? (Nor were Quakers the majority among British pacifists; the highest percentage of that group were in fact Methodists.) In any case, in the following sentence Orwell returns to the pacifists he’s actually thinking about: “but there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism.”

¹²Ceadel, "A Legitimate Peace Movement: The Case of Britain, 1918-1945," in Challenges to Mars, p. 142.

¹³Thus Andrew Rigby refers to “the [PPU’s] leadership’s refusal to contemplate any form of civil disobedience” (“The Peace Pledge Union: From Peace to War, 1936-1945,” Challenge to Mars, p. 172).

An interesting exception: Norma Page, who’d been doing voluntary fire-watching, refused to do compulsory fire-watching, and was sentenced to fourteen days in prison (ibid., p. 178).

¹⁴Orwell came to recognize this also, writing in 1945 that “it has been made easy for COs to choose non-military jobs, and the number refusing all kinds of national service has been tiny” (3:385). But he didn’t consider the implications of these facts.

¹⁵Rigby, "Peace Pledge Union," p. 177.

¹⁶Ibid., p. 181.

¹⁷Peter Brock and Nigel Young, Pacifism in the twentieth century (Syracuse, N.Y. : Distributed by Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 168.

¹⁸On the demography of conscientious objectors, see ibid., pp. 164-66.

¹⁹"The Peace Pledge Union," p. 182.

²⁰Comfort, No Such Liberty ((London: Chapman & Hall, 1941), pp. 108-09.

²¹This is the only case, in what I’ve read at any rate, of Orwell’s meeting a pacifist in person, and moreover of his meeting a pacifist he didn’t already know.

²²Quoted in Brock and Young, Pacifism, p. 133.

²³See also Orwell’s 1943 review of Lionel Fielden’s Beggar My Neighbor: “the idea put forward by Gandhi himself, that if the Japanese came they could be dealt with by sabotage and ‘non-cooperation,’ is a delusion, nor does Gandhi show any very strong signs of believing in it. Those methods have never seriously embarrassed the British and would make no impression on the Japanese. After all, where is the Korean Gandhi?” (2:310)

²⁴Similarly: “underneath his less ordinary qualities one feels all the time the solid middle-class businessmen who were his ancestors” (4: 465).

²⁵This is a significant revision of Orwell’s earlier attitude, when Gandhi’s friendship with the wealthy Sarabhai family seemed to count for him as hypocrisy. On that friendship see Erik Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth (New York: Norton, 1969).

²⁶Ibid., p. 234.

²⁷A further manifestation of Orwell’s generosity, though less directly related to the question of pacifism, is his overall judgment of Gandhi’s life work. It’s a common thing to say about that work that “[Gandhi] had lived just long enough to see his life work in ruins” (4: 469). But Orwell rejects that critique too: “it was not in trying to smooth down Hindu-Moslem rivalry that Gandhi had spent his life. His main political objective, the peaceful ending of the British rule, had after all been attained” (4: 470).

²⁸I’m presuming in what follows that certain of Orwell’s critiques can be regarded as already answered, either because he withdrew them, or because Gandhi’s example is an implicit refutation of them, or because all that needs to be done to refute them is to say, e.g., “pacifists who refuse to make a distinction of value between Churchill’s England and Hitler’s Germany are being bad pacifists.”

²⁹See Leila Danielson’s regrettably unpublished essay, “’In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi’: American Pacifists, Christianity, and Gandhian Nonviolence, 1915-1941,” passim. On the relation between non-resistance and resistance in 19th-century American pacifism, see my "Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience: Sources, Argument, Influence," in William Cain ed., A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

³⁰Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973), pp. v-vi.

³¹Philip Paul Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed : The Story of the Village of Le Chambon, and How Goodness Happened There (New York : Harper & Row, 1979), and Pierre Sauvage, The Weapons of the Spirit (Los Angeles: Friends of Le Chambon, 1989).

³²See on this Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

³³Aaron Falbel, personal communication, February 19th 2003.

³⁴It would be interesting, in this context, to think about how Orwell’s experiences of poverty do and don’t resemble the sort of voluntary poverty practiced by pacifists. For acute reflections on Orwell’s thinking about the matter, see Margery Sabin’s piece in this volume, ***.

³⁵James, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd ed. and intr., Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History(Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1995), p. 73.

³⁶Brock and Young, Pacifism, p. 116.

³⁷Rigby, "Peace Pledge Union," p. 172.

³⁸Susan Sontag, “On Courage and Resistance,” The Nation, May 5 2003, p. 11.

Works Cited and Consulted

Peter Brock and Thomas P. Socknat eds., Challenge to Mars: Essay on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999)

Peter Brock and Nigel Young, Pacifism in the twentieth century (Syracuse, N.Y. : Distributed by Syracuse University Press, 1999)

Martin Ceadel, "A Legitimate Peace Movement: The Case of Britain, 1918-1945," in Brock and Socknat

Alexander Comfort, No Such Liberty (London: Chapman & Hall, 1941)

Leila Danielson, “’In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi’: American Pacifists, Christianity, and Gandhian Nonviolence, 1915-1941,” unpublished essay

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981)

Josephine Eglin, “Women Pacifists in Interwar Britain,” in Brock and Socknat

Erik Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969)

Jonah Goldberg, “Safire’s Courage,” National Review Online, 1/7/02, http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg010702.shtml

Philip Paul Hallie, Lest innocent blood be shed : the story of the village of Le
Chambon, and how goodness happened there (New York : Harper & Row, 1979)

Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2002)

William James, “The Moral in Equivalent of War.” In Lynd and Lynd, Nonviolence in America

Michael Kelly, “Pacifists are not Serious People,” Washington Post 9/26/01, http://www.townhall.com/columnists/michaelkelly/mk20010926.shtml.

Roger Kimball, “Failures of Nerve,” The New Criterion 21:3, November 2002,
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/nov02/aa-kimball.htm

Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd ed. and intr., Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1995)

George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters (Jaffrey, New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 2000; orig. pub. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.

Andrew Rigby, “The Peace Pledge Union: From Peace to War, 1936-1945,” in Brock and Socknat.

Lawrence Rosenwald, "Thoreau's Essay on Civil Disobedience: Sources, Argument, Influence," in William Cain ed., A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Pierre Sauvage, The Weapons of the Spirit (Los Angeles: Friends of Le Chambon, 1989

Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973)

Susan Sontag, “On Courage and Resistance,” The Nation, May 5 2003

Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

John Woolman, The Journal and Major Essays, ed. Phillips P. Moulton (Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press, 1989)

Created by: Jiayang Chien '05
Maintained by: Lawrence Rosenwald
Date Created: August 6, 2003
Last Modified: August 7, 2003