Pacifist Response to Hitler

Are you confusing your TFS threads?

Was it mentioned in another thread here?

Maybe I'm just confusing my screens Haha

Personally I love time warps... I've had a few (completely unrelated to drugs or alcohol). They are super cool and completely unexplainable.

Interesting book...

"From Dictatorship to Democracy, A Conceptual Framework for Liberation"
by Gene Sharp

General topic: Methods Of Nonviolent Action & how to destroy a dictatorship and to prevent the rise of a new one.

The Financial Times, in discussing the prospects for dictators worldwide, described Sharp as "the Lenin of the new Gandhi-ism" stating that

What is new... is the wildfire spread of systematically non-violent insurgency. This owes a great deal to the strategic thinking of Gene Sharp, an American academic whose how-to-topple-your-tyrant manual, From Dictatorship to Democracy, is the bible of activists from Belgrade to Rangoon.

Note from Chaski: I have this book. I found it interesting. However, I don't think this would have work for the Jews against the Nazis.

What were the proposed methods?

Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days.

That's eight tenths of a million people wiped off the face of the earth. Gone. Murdered. Dead. In just barely over three months on the calendar.

This was not in some anachronistic, archaic backland of the middle ages with Vlad the Impaler sticking heads on pikes...the victims were not killed while being pressed into slavery on some eighteenth or nineteenth century ship. This was an exit or two back on the highway.

I have adult memories of this happening.

To paraphrase from another thread on this site that I posted in a long time ago, history provides incredibly few examples of people who categorically say that all war in all forms is unjust who also have lived under extreme oppression and truly tyrannical, abusive powers. The vast majority of people who make those categorical claims have the luxury of their idealism because they do not have to fight to live peacefully and without real oppression directing the way they live or die. Yes, racism and sexism, homophobia...those are all forms of oppression and should be battled as effectively as possible without resorting to violence.

In my opinion, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the absolute greatest men in modern history, anywhere in the world, for his efforts in advancing that ideal in people and spreading a message of love and acceptance over reactionary violence and conflict.

But still, there is less room for philosophy when you and your family are being starved to death. Or herded, cow-like, into a killing field.

It is very easy to speak of the immorality of war and claim that any rationale of it is perverse from the relative comfort of a life devoid of the turmoils of those less fortunate. And those claims are often made in the name of philanthropy and pacifism.

But there is no compassion or philanthropy in condemning those very people for seeing merit in fighting for a better life for themselves, through warfare if necessary, and shaming them from the distant shelter of your own, better life.

I am certain that the Jews of Warsaw would fail to see the humanity in telling them society should have voted them into a safer existence and that because of that rationale, they should not resort to violence to save themselves and their own.

I do understand Jennifer's points and agree with many of them, actually. I do believe that warfare should be a last, rather than a first resort. I do believe that that "x in the box" method of fighting oppression is preferable to the gun in the hand method. But even in very recent times in the world, there are places where the x in the box is not an option. It isn't a case of it being ineffective, in some instances it's a case of it being nonexistent. In the wake of the truths of things like the existence of idiotic nationalism in most developed nations on both sides of the pond, and untruths like the proffered lie that the american police are murdering a disproportionate amount of black people for no reason (yes, this is an untruth), what we are left with is a society in a volatile, delicate state. When you boil a pot of water, just before it starts to bubble, you can see the heat writhing and moving around inside the liquid. That writhing is going on in our communities in a lot of places now, and truths mounted on untruths mounted on other truths, ad nauseum, only serve to add to the confusion.

But that's all still going on in a civilized, organized world where we do have those boxes to place x's into.

War is a filthy, ugly, dirty, rotten thing that we do. And where it happens, the world is not civilized and organized and becomes more hostile and chaotic. It's a natural human reaction to have an aversion to that. The combat veterans I have known are the people who are the most acutely aware of that aversion and fall the most silent when the topic of war is breached.

But history is unfortunately littered with examples in which the avoidance of war failed humanity and ended innocent lives. It is for those reasons that I am rather reluctant to then besmirch the efforts of those who picked up a rifle in defense of the millions, some of them my own ancestors, who were denied the right to the x in the box and placed in boxes of their own...starved, gutted, sexually assaulted...flayed alive...gassed...and sent up the chimney at the hands of an army of psychopaths who time and again had proven that they would not respond to pacifistic appeals. That is, after all, what we are speaking about.

There is a personal historic connection I have with those people, and it stirs something heartwrenching in me to know that many of them may have been ultimately saved an insurmountable degree of suffering and torture had action been taken sooner as the German army was violating treaties and breaching borders while diplomatic pleas fell dead on their ears. Perhaps it hits closer to home for me, and perhaps that's part of my view in the issue. Perhaps not.

There are quite a lot of things to do... ranging from “sit-ins” to hunger strikes, from non-violent blockades to establishing a sort of insurgency/subversive channel of communications with the dictator’s troops/officers…aides/family/etc/

At some point direct negotiation with the dictator seems logical but is often a ruse by the dictator, so advice there is to be careful

Here is a link to a pdf… non-violent resistence

After reading it, and having some knowledge of the Holocaust, I don't think the techniques would have worked for the Jews... or really for any group becoming the victims of genocide.

Thank you.

Unfortunately the only examples where such methods were put into practice and proven effective were in places where the government in power had a moral compass that was, for the most part, already in practice. Such was the case for Gandhi and MLK, so it was much easier to play the conscious and win than it probably would have been against the likes of Hitler.

I don’t have much more to add to that since Eaglebauer above explains very well why it worked for them and may not when under more hostile regimes.

But I await Jennifer’s response on how she would deal with the more extreme inhumane examples whenever they, and once they do, occur, if she were in power at the time of such occurrences. Maybe she can convince us otherwise.

Neville Chamberlain. His attitude was wrong.

That's the entire argument against pacifism especially for someone like Hitler.

Strength is the best pacifist approach. You never hear about a prize fighter getting mugged. Muggers attack the weak. The same goes for countries.

What type of pacifism are we talking about here? There are different non violent responses to aggression. One option is to hide, and to keep hiding should you be found. Another is to declare yourself and those that follow you neutral parties, and to only engage in purely defensive acts, like protecting yourselves. Another is a favorite of MLK and Ghandi, which is to openly declare yourself in opposition to your aggressors, but not take part in violence.

As an aside, your question here is reliant on the idea that some people attack or hurt others for no reason, and thus cannot be reasoned with and the only recourse is incarceration or death. Is this the stance you are taking or am I missing something?

Pick one.

Which one would have worked as a "response to Hitler".