PACIFISM causes wars. Peaceniking is national suicide. Non-resistance kills.
Here we go again: the bishops, the synods, the BBC endemic, those nice people we meet at church, the high-minded diversity-mongers in their cosy suburbs – all are outraged by Donald Trump’s attack on the Iranian Islamic dictatorship and by Israel’s use of force against the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered 1,195 innocent Jewish holidaymakers on October 7, 2023.
Their perverse refusal to look facts squarely in the face and to respond intelligently dismays me, and reminds me of one of the most disgraceful speeches ever made by a British prime minister in the House of Commons. In 1936 Stanley Baldwin addressed the MPs: ‘Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was re-arming and that we must re-arm? Does anybody think that our pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the General Election from my point of view more certain.’
In other words. Stanley Baldwin put personal and party interests above national security and well-being. Are you listening, Sir Keir Starmer, even as you refuse a US request to use RAF Fairford and the British‑controlled base at Diego Garcia for a strike on Iran? Or as you treacherously give away the Chagos Islands?
It’s a cop-out to blame the politicians. In 1938 Baldwin’s successor Neville Chamberlain was met with ‘delirious cheers’ on his return from Munich where he had just sold out to Hitler. The great majority of the people are always gullible, wishful thinkers. That is why they voted for the Green Party in Manchester on Thursday, despite the stated policies of that bunch of anarchistic idiots who have declared their wish to legalise all drugs and to abolish international borders. Banana republic here we come – sans bananas.
As the writer C H Sisson said, genuine conservatives ‘have always been a party of opposition since Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham in 1642’.
Pacifism causes wars. We are besieged by paradox. For 12 years I was chaplain to the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, and I found soldiers to be among the gentlest of men. For 20 years before that, I lived in York and often met the pacifist ladies in the smart and snooty tea shops in Stonegate. They were some of the most aggressive people I’ve ever come across. Their denunciations of anything military were so violently expressed that it was as if they said ‘Sign the peace pledge, or we’ll kill you!’ Who put the ‘fist’ in ‘pacifist’?
Always, but particularly when, as now, war threatens rather more acutely than we are used to, we should recall that our troops put their lives on the line. These soldiers need to know that they have the support of their civilian countrymen who lie abed on Crispin’s Day. Sometimes, regrettably, this support seems to be lacking – especially in certain sections of the media and notoriously among the brainless church hierarchy. Of course, we all harbour a natural preference for peace rather than war. But it is the soldiers who more than anyone else prefer peace – because it is the soldiers who know at first-hand how terrible war is. There is something shabby and disrespectful about senior churchmen in their palaces – or media moguls at their talkative drinks parties – disdaining the actions of the soldiers on the battlefield. And it stinks of hypocrisy when vociferous pacifists disdain our troops but continue to enjoy the peace which the actions of the troops secure.
What these people need to get into their heads is that peace is not the mere absence of fighting. Peace is the life of a free people living under just laws. War and death are very bad but they are not – as the pacifists believe – the worst thing. Worse is to be defeated and overcome, to have freedom and justice taken away, to be subjugated by barbarism. We allow that the pacifist may choose not to defend himself when attacked, but we rightly question his morality when he refuses to take up the sword in defence of threatened and oppressed women and children.
One of the most clear-minded thinkers on these issues of war and peace was the soldier, poet and philosopher T E Hulme (1883-1917) who was killed by one of the last shells fired in the First World War. Hulme wrote: ‘The pacifists’ incapacity to realise the consequences of defeat arises from a relativistic, utilitarian ethic. They live securely and comfortably, finding a sufficient support in a sceptical rationalism. But individuals in a condition of danger, when the pseudo-absolutes melt away into a flux, require once more a real absolute to enable them to live.’
He noticed that the pacifism of his day, preached by such men as Bertrand Russell, arose from a progressive utilitarian ideology that found no place whatever for the heroic, that deeply discounted the importance of honour and that was prepared to sacrifice virtually any principle for the sake of so-called peace. Hulme had nothing but contempt for it: ‘It comes to this: that for these men death is too great a price to pay for anything. Life and comfort are their ultimate goods.’
And there you have it: Utilitarian, relativistic ethics denies the very existence of moral absolutes and so for the utilitarian all our actions should be judged according to the amount of pleasure they might produce and the amount of pain they might avoid. Nietzsche despised this as ‘pig philosophy’. Whereas the Judaeo-Christian tradition teaches that there are moral absolutes: in the Old Testament these are the Ten Commandments – the law which Jesus said he had come not to abolish but to fulfil.
Historian A R Roberts summed up Hulme’s argument against the utilitarian pacifists: ‘In the humanist view, everything is justified by its results, and the results are justified by their results and so on. The ultimate justification is either future happiness or human survival. This is totally opposed to the outlook that Hulme sometimes calls religious and sometimes classical. In that view, there are moral absolutes which are not justified by anything they may lead to but are simply good in themselves. Restraint, courage, self-sacrifice and truthfulness are qualities of this kind. If people have no sense of the reality of these absolute values, they have no standard by which they can perceive the radical imperfection of either man or nature, and they begin to think that life is the source and measure of all values and that man is fundamentally good.’
Pacifists often invoke the Sixth Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Actually, in the original language this says ‘Thou shalt do no murder’. Murder is wrongful killing. Killing in a just war is not the same as murder. And we should remember that for 1,500 years Christianity has upheld the concept of the just war as defined by such luminaries as St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and the Reformation Fathers. Pacifists should not go unchallenged and they must not be allowed to occupy the moral high ground, for their arguments are intellectually flawed and morally bankrupt.
Members of the Church of England – by which Richard Hooker and the 16th century divines meant every subject of the Crown – should notice that number 37 of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion declares: ‘It is lawful for Christian men at the commandment of the magistrate to wear weapons and serve in the wars.’
PS: As for the unilateral nuclear disarmers in the likes of such as CND, it is worth pointing out that the only nation to have an atomic bomb dropped on it was Japan, which did not possess nuclear weapons.
