The Immorality of Pacifism

Kitty Genovese.

It is more or less reflexive to most of us to refer to conflicts as “misunderstandings,” and to assume or insist that there must be blame on both sides. After all, in the real world, there are no good guys and bad guys.

“Teach men not to rape,” is one common example of this cockeyed logic. The same logic makes pacifists think of themselves as morally superior.

There is indeed a risk in dehumanizing one’s opponent. That is a different issue, arising in a different situation. What if you are a third party, seeing two others involved in some conflict?

Our true moral responsibility is not to chide them both, but to side with the right. Consider the classic, extreme, example of Kitty Genovese, being raped and stabbed in an apartment stairwell. Did or did not her neighbours have a moral duty to call the police, or even step outside their doors to try to stop it?

Should they have instead scolded Genovese for failing to get along with the rapist?

If there is a serious conflict, it is naturally unlikely to be caused by a misunderstanding. People would have to be remarkably stupid to come to blows or worse over a mere misunderstanding; and if they did, the matter would necessarily be easily set to rights.

It is, on the other hand, necessarily likely that a conflict would arise because one party wants to take the rights of another, and believes they are powerful enough that they can. That is, someone is doing evil.

This, therefore, must be assumed to be the case whenever a conflict is encountered.

We do not always do so, because we are morally weak. It is always safer and easier to stay out of it. One could, after all, get hurt; one could end up another victim. But when we claim moral superiority for our pacifism, for our neutrality, we have drifted into settled vice.

History is immensely valuable, because it gives us objective and well-documented examples of social and of moral dilemmas. This is why history was always studied. When we look at history, do we find many conflicts in which both sides were on equally solid moral grounds, and it was all just a misunderstanding?

Surely everyone accepts that the Second World War was a case of good against evil. Surely everyone, too, given the current demands to pull down statues, understands that slavery was a pure moral evil, and it would have been immoral for the Union government to allow it to persist.

Similarly, the Cold War, with all its minor ancillaries, was in the end best summed up as Reagan boldly did, to much criticism at the time, as a struggle with an “evil empire.” Now that the conflict is over, we can surely see that clearly.

I dare to say that almost all past conflicts can, when clearly seen, be seen as a conflict between good and evil. Back to the Punic Wars, between a Roman republic and a Carthaginian mercantile empire that practiced child sacrifice. Or the Peloponnesian War, between the Athenian democracy and a Sparta that was, in effect, a proto-Fascist state.

Right now, I think we see a struggle of good against evil in the streets of America, and in the growing aggression of the Chinese Communist Party.

It is the eternal battle, and it is real.