Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism.

AUTRES TEMPS, AUTRES MOEURS

'WHILE AT one time pacifists were single-mindedly devoted to the principles of nonviolence and reconciliation," Guenter Lewy writes, "today most pacifist groups defend the moral legitimacy of armed struggle and guerrilla warfare, and they praise and support the Communist regimes emerging from such conflicts."

It says much about our still-socialist age that this comes as no surprise. (Imagine, by contrast, the implausibility of the ACLU's being taken over by libertarians or the ADA's being recaptured by the cold-warriors who founded it.) The perennial Communist strategy has been to conceal its aggressive designs behind a mask of peace. Is there a dutiful leftist anywhere who does not proclaim PEACE from his bumper?

Lewy goes on to say that the "crucial change in outlook began during the American involvement in Vietnam, when the leading pacifist organizations not only opposed the U.S. role but gradually became ardent supporters of the National Liberation Front. This friendly disposition toward so-called national-liberation movements has continued--although, significantly, it does not include movements battling Communist domination."

A professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Lewy has written several scholarly books dealing with one or another aspect of the contemporary struggle with Communism. The four major organizations he examines here are the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the American Friends Service Committee, and the War Resisters League.

Lewy has left no stone unturned, and by the end of the book it is fair to say that he has left not one stone standing upon another. He demolishes the contemporary pacifists' peace-loving pretense--given that the socialist regimes they support are peaceful only in the way that concentration camps are peaceful. If those inside them don't put up a fight, it is only because they risk being shot if they do. The organizations Lewy describes should be thought of as vestigial structures, built and once occupied by real pacifists, but now mere husks convenient for disguising the antithetical goals of their new occupants.

There was once a time "when pacifists were pacifists," Lewy reminds us. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, founded in 1914, opposed working with Communists who "use a united front for boring from within." Its executive secretary, Alfred Hassler, argued as late as 1963 that " [we do not] build peace by allowing ourselves to be used by one side of the Cold War against the other." IN 1919, the recently founded WILPF stated that its "special part in this revolutionary age [was] to counsel against violence from any side."

The groups under scrutiny were all founded during or shortly after World War I. Lewy might well have devoted a chapter to the significance of this. In retrospect, I believe, a pacifist position in that war was reasonable. What on earth, we may now wonder, as pacifists at the time did wonder, were British and German soldiers doing, lined up in trenches a few hundred feet apart and blazing away at one another for weeks or months at a time? I'm sorry, but the assassination of an archduke at Sarajevo will not do at all. What principles were at stake, exactly? The relative size of the British and German navies?

In the present, protracted conflict, with Communists and their supporters on one side and everyone else on the other, clear principles are at stake and pacifism no longer makes any sense. Communism is an attempt to reorganize the world without God. The war we are in is therefore theological and total, and it has little room for neutrals, bandage-wrappers, and ambulance drivers. The war is spiritual, not geographical. Its divisions in no way correspond to national borders. The West has many Communist sympathizers, just as the Eastern Bloc has many believers and churchgoers.

Pacifism, which tries to stop aggression by making aggressors ashamed of themselves, is no more effective against Communism than it is against rape. Logically, therefore, pacifist organizations dating from World War I ought to have gone out of business. They have not, because their outer shells provide good camouflage for those who seek to promote the Communist cause under misleading auspices.

When Lewy says "American pacifists today rarely invoke God or the Sermon on the Mount, and few of them pray for the conversion of Soviet leader Gorbachev," he seems to be under the impression that those who now call themselves pacifists belong to the same taxonomic species as those who called themselves and really were pacifists in the 1920s. This is odd because Peace & Revolution documents with Lewy's characteristic thoroughness the step-by-step takeover of pacifist organizations by creatures of another stripe.

An ironical postscript: In a section on the widespread political influence of today's quasi-pacifists, Lewy notes that "the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States have questioned the moral acceptability of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence, the cornerstone of the West's defense posture."

This was true when Lewy wrote it, but now, confronted with the appalling possibility that the U.S. might actually defend itself against incoming Soviet missiles, the bishops, led by the ludicrous Bernardin of Chicago, have denounced Strategic Defense and now find Mutual Assured Destruction rather more to their liking. Once again, we see a pacifist position of at least some legitimacy being abandoned in favor of another more to the liking of the Soviet Union.