Interview With A Pacifist

Helen Fox

September, 2003

I: Helen, you have described yourself as a “radical pacifist.”  What does that mean, exactly?

H: I think I’m looking for a way to say that I’m an “activist pacifist,” that is, someone who isn’t just opposed to war, but who is actively working towards a future where all human societies see state-sanctioned violence as a remnant of their “uncivilized” past – the way human sacrifice is viewed today.

I: What makes you think that such a future is possible?

H: Blind faith, I guess. Once when I was traveling out west I came across a little roadside museum that featured some dusty spears and shields used by indigenous people in the early 1800s. “Weapons of War” was the title.  It struck me that one day my descendants might visit a museum that held “weapons of war” from the 20th century: a couple of machine guns, a fighter plane, a nuclear weapon or two, maybe a tattered flag, some photos of children without arms or legs screaming and writhing on the ground, a newspaper article extolling the patriotism of citizens who did not protest, and, in the background, gravesites of the century’s 200 million victims. Suddenly I felt certain that visitors of the future would see all weapons of war as remnants of a way of life they could barely imagine. All this seems so inevitable to us now, but why couldn’t such an exhibit evoke the same feeling of historical distance as bows and arrows do, or the same sense of horror as a Holocaust Museum? 

I: Do you think our descendants will blame us for the excesses of the 20th century?

H: No more than we blame the high priests of human sacrifice for the terror and suffering they caused in the past. Actually, I think our descendants will understand us better than we understand ourselves. We’re so caught up in defending military solutions to human problems that it’s hard to see the utter depravity of what we’re doing. Even more importantly, it’s hard to see a way out of the violent system we’re all a part of.

I: Most people already agree that it’s better to avoid war, don’t you think? 

H: I think human beings have an instinctive repugnance for war.  Military recruits have to be carefully drilled and desensitized to overcome what seems to be a natural aversion to killing. Army psychologists tell us that throughout most of history, the majority of combat soldiers refused to kill, even to save their own lives or the lives of their comrades. In World War II, for example, only 15 to 20 percent of US riflemen actually fired their weapons (See, for example, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995).

I: So if humans have a natural aversion to war, why do so many perfectly nice people still uphold it as rational and necessary?

H: Partly it’s our removal from the action. Most of us don’t witness the explosions, the decapitations, the terrified screams, the emotional and physical agony that war is about. We’re not encouraged to know our victims as human beings with personalities and experiences and dreams like ours. If a child who dies from picking up an unexploded cluster bomb is a member of our own family, we feel her death is horrible, unconscionable.  If she’s someone else’s child, far away, or if we see her as fundamentally different from our kind – different religion, different value system, different sort of hair or eyes  –  then it’s easier to see the snuffing out of her life as merely regrettable – or none of our business.

I: But isn’t it natural to think of one’s own family first?

H: Sure. But it’s natural to think of non-family members as precious as well. Your best friend, for example; your classroom of third graders; your baseball buddies – none of these people are related to you. But after you develop ties with people, after you begin to see them as individuals with all their quirky and loveable qualities, it becomes impossible to see their death as “regrettable” or the inevitable “collateral damage” of war.

I: But what if they’re not nice and cuddly at all? What if they’re terrorists, or cold-blooded killers?

H: I agree that it’s harder to think of a suicide bomber boarding your bus or an enemy pilot intent on dropping a bomb on your city as a human being whose life is sacred. But once you see them as ordinary people much like your own friends and relatives, it’s harder to dismiss their lives as worthless. For example, I am acquainted with one of the scientists who helped develop the atomic bomb, the kind that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that terrorized, maimed, and incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. But this scientist is a delightful person, intelligent, interesting, reasonable in argument, worldly, humane. Might not other kinds of terrorists have some of these same qualities? I have also become acquainted with people serving life sentences in prison, and I’ve been impressed with their years of accumulated wisdom, their sense of humor, their artistic abilities, their concern for children on the “outside.” If they were simply “evil” I don’t think I’d see any of these attributes.

I: But you can’t equate an atomic scientist with an ax murderer! That scientist was serving his country! Those civilian deaths were regrettable, but...

H: But they were the enemy, right? You know, I grew up in the 1950s, when World War II propaganda was still around.  Comic books and playground games taught kids to see the Japanese as evil and scheming, completely devoid of principles or values. We learned about “Japanese water torture” from our little friends in the schoolyard, and how they hammered bamboo shoots under prisoners’ fingernails. The word “Jap” was a common epithet. We played bombardier pilot, making airplane noises and yelling, “Bombs away!” as we crushed the enemy and rescued prisoners of war. So even though I was also taught to be a humanitarian, I grew up believing that there was something about the Japanese that was inherently different from people I knew. They were colder, perhaps, and therefore more prone to sadism. Otherwise, how could they do such terrible things?  Yet when I visited Japan years later, I was surrounded by perfectly ordinary people, many of whom were incredibly generous to me. I was invited into people’s homes, made to feel part of the family, indulged with tours around town. Total strangers went out of their way to help me -- in one small town a young woman even took me to my destination in a taxi she paid for herself. Yet these were the very people I had been taught to see as evil fanatics, people who deserved to be annihilated by an atomic bomb we’d nicknamed “Little Boy.”

I: To shorten the war.

H: Yes, that’s what we’re told. We unleashed the A-bomb on Japanese civilians to save the lives of American troops who would have died in more prolonged combat. But that kind of thinking only makes sense if the life of an American is worth more than the life of a Japanese. One of my favorite pacifists, Howard Zinn (who, by the way, had been an enthusiastic WWII bombardier before he thought deeply about what he had been doing), said this: If it had been suggested that we sacrifice 100 American children to end the war sooner, no American would have agreed. But if we were to sacrifice 100 Japanese children, that would be considered reasonable.

I: So you’re saying it’s nationalism that causes this kind of thinking?

H: Nationalism – pride in one’s country -- is not bad in itself. But when it’s combined with stereotyping and militarism it can create havoc. All throughout the war Americans were fed racist images and slogans by politicians and news commentators that stoked war fever and justified atrocities. Did you know that Dr. Seuss started his career drawing racist political cartoons of the Japanese during wartime?

I: Really?

H: Yes, you can see the originals on-line (http://orpheus-1.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dspolitic/index.htm). The interesting thing about Dr. Seuss is that he was a political leftist who publicly denounced anti-black racism and anti-Semitism, yet pilloried the Japanese – including Japanese Americans, whom he derided as saboteurs. His malicious ridicule still echoes whenever an East Asian country does something that the US doesn’t like. If North Korea rattles its nuclear weapons or China protests a territorial incursion by a US spy plane, their leaders are depicted in cartoons that look remarkably like Dr. Seuss’s stereotypical Japanese: the same piggish-looking nose, the squinting little eyes, the coke-bottle eyeglasses. . .

I: Okay. I take your point that we’ve got to be taught to hate, and wartime propaganda has been very effective at that.  But you must concede that some people are truly dangerous. Those lifers you talked to, for example. They weren’t so humane when they were committing their crimes! I’m sure you’ve been asked what you would do, as a pacifist, if someone broke into your house and threatened to kill you or your family. Wouldn’t you be forced to strike back?

H: Yes, that’s a classic question, and a good one. Here’s how I think about it: As a woman I’ve rarely been able to rely on my physical strength to stop someone who was intent on hurting or humiliating me. That’s a fact of life that most women live with. We can’t just throw a punch if someone threatens us; we’re not trained to fight, and most of our potential attackers are bigger than we are. And since I’ve never learned how to use a gun and have no intention of carrying one, I can’t rely on technology to upgrade my strength. Even if I did carry a gun, my assailant would easily be able to take it away from me – simply because he would be stronger and more skilled at handling weapons than I am. So when someone threatens me, I’m forced to think of other ways to protect myself. My mother is my role model here. Once when she woke up to find an intruder in her bedroom she yelled at him so suddenly, and with such outrage, that he dashed out of the room and down the stairs, slamming the front door behind him. Actually, my mom kept a blackjack in her dresser drawer (her brother, who was a police officer, had insisted) but the dresser was on the other side of the room. There was no way she could have confronted this person other than nonviolently.

I: So nonviolence doesn’t imply weakness or passivity.

H: Exactly. It requires a creative response to each individual situation, and always, great courage. Some techniques, like my mom’s, are more or less instinctive. Others are crafted by leaders with great care and attention to their usefulness in a particular situation. Some are thousands of years old. For example, the Korean martial arts form, tae kwon do, uses the assailant’s own power and speed to neutralize his aggression, rather than confronting him with physical strength alone.

I: Have you ever had such an experience – using nonviolent tactics in a dangerously violent situation?

H: Fortunately, not very often. But a few years ago when the Ku Klux Klan decided to stage a rally in Ann Arbor, I got myself trained as a peacekeeper along with about a hundred other volunteers.  City officials felt they had to let the Klan have their say, so they decided to bus them in (“for their own protection”) and allow them to broadcast their hate messages from behind a fence hastily constructed around City Hall. The police had agreed – after much negotiation with the peacekeepers – to reduce their presence and let us try to keep things calm by walking around in small groups in our yellow “peace team” t-shirts, looking for signs of trouble. Several hundred people had gathered to watch the spectacle, and tension was high. An anti-Klan group known for their violent confrontations in other cities marched down the block, shouting provocative slogans (“Hey Klaaaan, we’re gonna fuck you up!”). Some of the peacekeepers marched with them, silently, to show support for their sense of justice, if not for their methods. Suddenly there was shouting and about a dozen people broke from the crowd and dashed down the street. When my little group of peacekeepers caught up with them they had cornered a young guy wearing a Confederate t-shirt and were beating him with a bottle. He was backed into a doorway, bleeding and shaking, and a huge lump was rising from his forehead. We worked our way through the mob of attackers and managed to link arms around the victim. The viciousness of the attackers and the thought that they had lost all restraint was terrifying. I’d never seen such brutality up close. In training, we had learned to try to connect with aggressors in a human way, saying dumb but pleasant things like, “Hey man, where did you get those shoes?” but that seemed so inappropriate that we just pleaded with them to stop. They ignored us, of course, just kept yelling and surging forward while the foreign press shoved their cameras across our locked arms into the victim’s face. But the mob didn’t touch us -- In fact, I felt a strange sort of respect coming from them, even as they ridiculed us. We were a bunch of crazy peaceniks, true, but there we were in the middle of a violent confrontation, without weapons, without protection, some of us grandmothers, all of us there out of conviction that violence cannot make the world just. Suddenly a young black man who, we found out later, just happened to be walking down the street minding his business – he hadn’t even heard about the Klan rally -- pushed his way through the crowd, ducked under our linked arms, and turning to the mob, pleaded for calm. “I don’t want to see a man killed today,” he told them, over and over, and soon, the angry yelling diminished, and one by one, the attackers turned and walked away.

I:  Wow. Why do you think his words had such power?

H: He was making a “Not In My Name” kind of statement, which was especially powerful since the attackers were mostly white. The mob was caught up short for a minute. They had to think, “Why is a black man, one of the Klan’s major targets, defending this no-good white guy?”

I: But wouldn’t it have been better if the police had been there to break up the fight?  Or is that also against your pacifist principles?

H: If the police had arrested the ringleaders without undue violence it might not have been a bad thing, but it also might have kept the attackers from reflecting on their own tactics. Seeing a black man defend someone who looks like a racist bully must have a more powerful effect than simply being arrested and hauled before a judge.  And the attackers weren’t the only ones to learn something from the experience. The victim’s girlfriend, who had also been beaten and bloodied, but had found refuge in a nearby bar, remarked, while we were all waiting for the medic, that she was impressed by both the peace team intervention and the fact that a black guy stopped the fight. She used to hate black people, she told us, because they had caused her so much grief throughout her life, but now she could see that some of them were good. In fact, she added, there are probably good people and bad people in every race because she knew plenty of bad whites as well. Would she have reflected on this if the police had just bashed a few more heads?

I: It sounds like you deplore the use of force by the police as well.

H: I think police are often too quick to use bullying or intimidating tactics. Most police forces lack training and skill in conflict resolution and nonviolent management of dangerous situations. Using overpowering force seems easier, especially when they have such sophisticated weapons at their disposal. This is especially bad for the young people who choose police work for the thrill of catching bad guys and dispensing some sort of street justice – a bit too much like the mob chasing the guy in the Confederate t-shirt to me. Police work doesn’t have to be based on violence and self-righteousness and contempt. It can be effective, and a lot safer, using humane, low-key tactics and recruiting more officers with the capacity and will for restraint, self-knowledge, and a willingness to live with complexity.

I: Maybe that would work in some cases, but don’t you think there are people who won’t listen to any language but force? I mean, “loving your enemy” is fine in theory, but, in practice it seems a bit naďve.

H: Martin Luther King said something about the power of love and nonviolence that’s interesting in this regard. He was speaking in Selma, Alabama during the voter registration drive in 1965 after a female supporter had been beaten by the police. The people were angry and ready to abandon their nonviolent tactics – because the racist police don’t know any other language than brute force – but Dr. King urged them to keep strong in the spirit of nonviolence and love. He was not talking about “emotional bosh,” as he put it – a naďve, touchy-feely attitude toward people who are out to get you. “It would be nonsense to urge oppressed people to love their violent oppressors in an affectionate sense,” he told them. “I’m talking about something much deeper.”

I: And that was...?

H: The conviction that all human life is sacred.

I: But how do we put that into practical terms?

H: You have to start with the conviction. Everything else flows from that.  If you believe that conflicts can be solved without murdering the people who oppose you, then you’ll start looking for methods and means to accomplish that. And you wouldn’t have to look that far; the last century has seen scores of nonviolent movements accomplish incredible political and social change in the face of overwhelming odds. The fall of the Soviet Union, for example, was quietly facilitated by peaceful, democratic movements for self-determination in East Germany in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Leaders of all these movements insisted on nonviolent tactics because they refused to become like the regimes they despised. Gandhi’s “experiments with truth” in India; Cesar Chavez’s grape boycotts in California; the Civil Rights Movement in the South, all eventually triumphed over oppression without bloodshed. Popular protests toppled Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines; Augusto Pinochet in Chile, General Suharto in Indonesia, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia . . .

I: These are impressive examples. But it took years for these movements to get organized and accomplish their goals. What about times when immediate intervention is necessary for humanitarian reasons? Conflicts in Rwanda, for example, or Bosnia, or Guatemala -- are we just to stand by and let neighbors chop off each other’s arms and legs, use babies for target practice, gang rape young children?  When people are doing the worst things that any human being could dream up, shouldn’t we just come in and make them stop?

H: Yes, we should make them stop. But first we should admit that war – that is, violence sanctioned by the state, or even by the United Nations – is no different in the level and kinds of atrocities it practices than is the clan or tribal warfare that we’re so willing to judge as primitive or savage. Is it more inhumane to go after your neighbors with a machete or to scatter land mines where children will be certain to pick them up?  Is it crueler to snatch a baby from its mother’s arms and impale it on a bayonet, as Nazis were said to have done, or to blow a baby’s head off in a bomb shelter and call it “collateral damage,” as the US did in Iraq?

I: But there are rules of war! It’s not just anything goes!

H: Yes, there are rules of war, made up when people thought war was inevitable. I would argue that the rules themselves are unconscionable – but first I would say that those rules are often broken. For example, soldiers are not supposed to mistreat noncombatants, yet women are regularly raped in wartime, often by the “good guys.” In Bosnia, for example, rapes of women were filmed for pornographic entertainment by the “peacekeeping” forces as well as the “enemy.”  War brutalizes both the victims and the perpetrators.

I: So you’re saying that all violent intervention, even for humanitarian reasons, is corrupting?

H: It seems so. We can so easily justify our own kind of violence as “the good kind.”

I: So how do we intervene in a humane way – a way that will stop the violence yet avoid perpetrating more of the same?

H: There are both long-term and immediate strategies we can draw on that are pretty easy to come up with. First, we can stop supporting dictators, even when they have some resource that we want access to, like oil, or when they oppose some political philosophy that we’re afraid of, like Communism. We can stop arming both sides of international conflicts, and phase out gun manufacture and ownership in our own country. We can give up the manufacture and use of land mines and nuclear weapons, and persuade other countries to follow suit.

I: But if we give up our weapons first, what’s to say a terrorist group or a despotic government won’t take the opportunity to unleash even more violence against us?

H: Buddhists say that behind anger and violence there is often fear. I would add that there is also humiliation. If we respond to our enemies’ anger with tough talk and crushing force, the fear and humiliation remain. The anger may go underground for awhile, but it will fester and grow and eventually explode again. This is the history of war and conquest. But if we ask why people fear us, if we look at the ways we patronize and belittle them, we will bring our practice more in line with our professed values of equality and democracy. This will open the way for talking and negotiation. Understanding those who threaten us is much more difficult than simply loading up the bombers, but if we put our minds to it, we can learn how to do it more skillfully.

I:  Do you imagine a world that functions so smoothly and fairly that nations – or whatever replaces nations in the future – will live without disagreement?

H: That’s a lovely vision, but I think it’s unrealistic. There will always be injustices and power struggles between groups that will need to be settled. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with spirited disagreement! That’s what makes for intellectual diversity and the birth of new ideas. The important thing is to make up our minds as a world community that we can give up violence, even as a “last resort.”

I: How long do you think it will take?

H: I certainly don’t expect to see it in my lifetime. The war machine is so entrenched and violence seems so inevitable that it will take many years to change human society at a global level. All countries and peoples would need to live with each other on a more egalitarian basis, first of all. The economic and social systems could not continue to deny some groups a place at the table while allowing others to reap huge rewards. The causes of disagreements: the desire for dignity, identity, resources, decision-making power, all these would have to be addressed.  We would need to build new international institutions, based on a true sharing of power. Cross cultural skills, so crucial to understanding, communication, and diplomacy, will need to be developed and employed not only by diplomats, but by ordinary people in our increasingly interconnected world. We would need to learn new strategies for responding to human rights abuses and outbreaks of violence during the time of transition. We would need to divest ourselves of our most dangerous weapons, and eventually, all weapons, while building trust and alternatives to violence. We would need to internationalize our school curricula and teach practical strategies of conflict resolution at every level. We would need to teach the success stories of nonviolent direct action, so ignored in our present day classrooms. We would need to provide young people from working class communities with financially attractive opportunities for leadership training and adventure abroad without having to engage in war and exploitation.  Think of what we could come up with if we devoted the same amount of resources to peace work that we presently do to the manufacture of bombs and missiles, and the maintenance of the armed forces! All this involves a massive cultural, economic, social, even spiritual shift that cannot happen overnight.

I: Sounds pretty long-term.

H: On the other hand, my twelve-year-old niece believes that human beings are capable of living without violence right now. Even President Bush -- even he could live nonviolently, she tells me. He just lacks the will to do it.

I: She has a point.

H: She certainly does.

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