Pacifism in history

This is something that Bach knows more about than I do, but since he passed by a comment of yours, let me just add a thought. "The belief that being nice to them would really have any effect is seriously challenged by the history of the 1930s. It was the basis of the appeasement policy - but failed completely. Luther King's quote is just plain wrong about WWII - it was the power of the allies that overcame the evil of the Nazi and Japanese systems, destroyed them and provided space for a new beginning." I used to believe this too until (while in England during the V-E Day anniversary) I saw a BBC documentary on pacifism during World War II; that opened my eyes to the complexity of this topic. There was actually more than one brand of pacifism in the years leading up to World War Two. The kind we always hear about - the kind that failed - was pacificism through appeasement. The people holding this belief had the naive notion that if you gave the Nazis what they wanted, they'd go away. But there was another form of pacifism at that time: pacifism through nonviolent resistance. This is the type of pacifism that King later practiced; it is based, not on the belief that you should allow evil to go unchecked, but that the most effective form of fighting evil is through resisting that evil nonviolently. The tragedy of World War Two is that the second type of pacifism was never attempted. The allies went straight from saying, "We'll give the Nazis everything they want," to saying, "Kill them." We can never know what would have happened if the allies had attempted nonviolent resistance, but we *do* know that some of the people on the Continent who resisted the Nazis did so successfully through nonviolent resistance. Heather [E-mail]   [Home Page]