Pacifism must be a choice.

Today, we will have another anti-war rally here in San Francisco. Tens of thousands of smug people-- way to pleased with themselves-- will high-handedly lecture us from the vaunted position of their unassailable moral authority. Forget for a moment that these events are nothing more than emotional masturbation, a group gestalt and self-congratulatory nonesense. Forget the fact that none of these protests would be possible without the system that so many of the protestors hate. Forget the reality that many of these protests do, in fact, turn violence and are generally permeated with a strong sense of beliigerence. Forget all of these things and you still have the one fundamental point that makes most pacifism rationalization masquerading as morality.

What do I mean by that? Not too long ago, I had a conversation with a lady roughly my age about the war in Iraq. She asked my opinion and to her credit, was genuinely open to hearing what I had to say. But before I could say anything, she said, "You should know, I'm a pacifist." An inocuous enough statement but what caught me was her sense of the moral superiority of her statement. I didn't choose to make an issue of it then but it reemphasized to me what I teach to all my students.

For pacifism to be a moral choice, you have to be able to do the opposite. In other words, if you have no capacity for violence, your pacifism is more statement of fact than it is a matter of morality. Such a statement typifies slave-morality. This swiftly degenerates into cowardice which becomes the foundation of appeasement. For a person who cannot fight, appeasement is the only option regardless of its morality.

What about someone like Gandhi then? Surely his pacifism is a moral one? I don't think so. He chose his tactic very carefully-- against an enemy who had lost his stomach to do the dirty work of counterinsurgency. Had he tried this in Darfur, he would not have been so successful I think. Nor was he able to mount an armed insurrection. He chose the only tactic he had and he was right solely because he had measured his opponent accurately. He was a great strategist but his actions have nothing to do with morality.

Violence is simply not less moral than non-violence. If you can stand aside and promote peace while others around you are being oppressed than your non-violence is of the immoral sort and I have no use for it. For those who truly are pacifists-- people who are capable of violence but walk away from it on ethical grounds-- I have nothing but respect for. But I have met very few such men. None in fact. This type of thinking allows us to confuse happy circumstance with morality. Many of us who fancy ourselves pacifist are lonly allowed to do so because of security provided by other men. Such morality is not moral. It's is the rantings of a spoiled teenager.