Myth and Reality: Pacifism’s Discourse on Violence Revisited

Introduction

My contribution will be divided into four parts. I will begin with the notoriously difficult question of defining pacifism. My suggestion is to take nonviolence as the key word for the whole pacifist movement. If this is the case, if the commitment to nonviolence defines pacifism better than anything else, then pacifism’s discourse on violence becomes a key topic as well. Pacifism stands and falls with its contentions about violence. Thus, if these contentions can be proved problematic, the whole pacifist project gets into trouble. I will start with what I call the burden of nonviolence. Nonviolence as a defining factor of one’s attitude to life is difficult, if not impossible, to be put into practice coherently. By focusing on recent developments in the Christian pacifist movement, in particular on the discourse on just policing, I will try to show the inner tensions in pacifism’s discourse on violence, which testify rather a burdensome adaptation of the dogma of nonviolence than its full-fledged approval. Why, then, is this dogma still upheld? An at least partial answer to this question will be given in more detail below: nonviolence imposes itself because of two basic contentions largely represented in pacifism’s discourse on violence. (A) Any use of violence begets violence and leads into a vicious spiral of escalating violence; (B) Anyone who accepts the use of violence, as limited as it may be, believes that violence is the best way for conflict resolution. I will show that these two contentions are rather myth than reality, and I argue for a case-by-case approach when it comes to a practical decision regarding the use of violence or not, even if this means to leave behind the path of categorical pacifism. A short conclusion leads to a proposal of how to maintain the pacifist legacy while taking into account my critical observations.

Defining Pacifism: Nonviolence as Key

Barbara Bleisch and Jean-Daniel Strub, in the introduction of the volume they edited on pacifism, present a discussion of how to define pacifism, a discussion which is to my knowledge the most comprehensive to date. By being comprehensive, their overview shows at the same time the flexibility of pacifist thinking. ‘Force pacifism’, ‘war pacifism’, ‘institutional pacifism’, ‘legal pacifism’, ‘responsible pacifism’, ‘technological pacifism’, ‘categoric pacifism’ and ‘conditional pacifism’ are just some of the various possible understandings of pacifism they present, many of them being in contradiction and excluding each other. ¹ The smallest common denominator proposed by Bleisch and Strub is the opposition to war, following, under others, Jenny Teichman who speaks of an ‘anti-war-ism’ at the very heart of each and any pacifism. ²

This attempt of definition by Bleisch and Strub seems to me, in spite of their admirable erudition, problematic. I see a methodological and a substantial problem. Methodologically, they mainly sum up the discussion on pacifism among philosophers, politicians and historians, who rather speak about pacifism than being active pacifists themselves. Therefore, Bleisch and Strub appear as second-order observers in the sense of Niklas Luhmann: they observe the observers of pacifism. Their starting point is the concept of pacifism, whereas pacifism is first and foremost a way of living, almost a spiritual approach, a commitment. You can also call it a culture in the way Bourdieu speaks of cultures, a pre-reflective habit combining acting and thinking. This culture of pacifism is centred around nonviolence, as I will show. Behind any form of pacifism are the pacifists, concrete people who try to establish an all-encompassing attitude of nonviolence in their everyday life. ‘Anti-war-ism’ as well as ‘legal pacifism’ are already secondary forms of pacifism, reacting to what I have called ‘the burden of nonviolence’, trying to adapt the initial programme of nonviolence to reality in order to make it more coherent. Therefore, it seems to me methodologically flawed to refer to these secondary forms, which represent rather abstract concepts, than the very concrete life form ‘pacifism’, in order to establish a definition of it.

This leads me right away to my substantial objection against ‘anti-war-ism’ as a definition of pacifism. A wise man once said that you should not lead your life against, but for something. To put it otherwise: it is not healthy to spend your energy in pure opposition to others, as a ‘Neinsager’ as they say in Switzerland; you need a positive goal you are striving for.

It is not difficult to identify such a positive goal for pacifists: they are striving for peace, and if they are against war, they take this stance because war stands in the way of peace. Therefore, it is flawed to make ‘anti-war-ism’ the very substance of pacifism. The very name ‘pacifism’—initially a self-designation—gives this indication, and actually it is a good starting point for an investigation of the characteristics of pacifism to analyse the meaning of the term ‘pacifism’.

It was coined as the name of a movement only at the beginning of the twentieth century, yet its origins are much older. And—not by chance—its first appearance designates people and not a concept. The term ‘pacifici’ appears in the Vulgata translation of Matt. 5:9, one of the beatitudes: ‘Beati pacifici: quoniam filii Dei vocabuntur’. As the New International Version puts it: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God’. A pacifist is first of all a peacemaker,‘pacem facere’, and this is remarkable for two reasons. First of all, it puts the emphasis on peace as the all-encompassing goal of each pacifist. And, secondly, it shows that pacifism is marked by a certain practice, by the making of peace. This second point is very important. Pacifists are often represented and criticised for their passivity, as pure bystanders, just waiting and observing while others are massacred. Nigel Biggar, for example, takes this stance when he objects to pacifists that they ‘perform deliberate acts of omission [!], which permit innocents to die at the hands of the unjust’. ³

Well, first of all, this objection cannot be correct for those pacifists who engage themselves actively in politics, as did those from the beginning of the twentieth century who strove for global institutions of law as a nonviolent means to establish international peace. I don’t see a reason why political activism should be called an ‘act of omission’. But, it is true, there are other pacifists too, who plead for a withdrawal from politics, for the way of the cross, including suffering and victimisation.

John Howard Yoder would be an example, and in fact it is Yoder who serves Biggar, in his bellicist approach close to an all-out justification of war, pretty much as the opposing image of the pacifist. Still, I am ready to claim that Biggar’s image of Yoder is rather a caricature. If Yoder renounces secular politics, he does it because he has another vision of politicising effectively, not because of an attitude of withdrawal. One of Yoder’s main works, ‘The Politics of Jesus’, establishes Jesus’ suffering and dying as the turning point of world history, and therefore as politically highly significant. By choosing for themselves the way of the cross, Christians and the Church follow Christ’s example and act themselves politically, opposing a politics of domination. Nonviolence is, according to Yoder, one of the signs of the Church, and it can be included in what Yoder says of the key activities of the Church in Body Politics: ‘These activities are visible; they are not opaque rituals. They lend themselves to being observed, imitated, and extrapolated.’ ⁴

The notion of ‘witness’ comes to mind, and ‘witness’ is key not only for a proper understanding of Yoder’s pacifism. Walter Wink’s reflections on nonviolent resistance also emphasise the effect it has on the other person as an observer: someone who observes as an aggressor that the victim, instead of defending herself, turns the other cheek to him, will, according to Wink, get unsettled in his intentions of humiliation and stop hitting. What may be called in psychological language a paradoxical intervention with Frankl and Watzlawick, ⁵ is, in Wink’s theory of a ‘third way’ between nonresistance and violent resistance, indeed an act of witness, effective in itself as an ‘act of defiance’. ‘And when large numbers being behaving thus’, says Wink, ‘you have a social revolution on your hands.’ ⁶ ‘Instead of the two options ingrained in us by millions of years of unreflective, brute response to biological threats from the environment: flight or fight, Jesus offers a third way.’ ⁷ ‘Jesus, in short, abhors both passivity and violence.’ ⁸

Whatever you call it, it is clear that Jesus’ command to nonviolence is seen, in the interpretation of Wink and other pacifists, as a very effective involvement with the world, rather the opposite of passive withdrawal. However, the most striking example for such an active passivity in the sense of pacifist witness is not to be found in Yoder or Wink, but in the work of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPTs) who literally lay down their lives when physically joining the oppressed in zones of conflict, unarmed in the face of the enemy. ⁹ An early study document from the time of their inception in 1986 emphasises the notions of witness and action: ‘The goal of CPT would be to witness to Jesus Christ as we seek to identify with the suffering, promote peace, reduce violence, identify with those caught in violence and oppression and foster justice by using the techniques of non-violent direct action.’ ¹⁰

All three examples—Yoder, Wink and the CPTs—can be taken as proof for a pacifist ‘anti-war-ism’. But they take a much larger approach: to turn the other cheek is seen by them as an attitude of everyday life, long before the level of states and groups waging war. Therefore, I consider these three examples as sufficient proof for my contention that violence as such and not war as institutionalized violence is the key topic of pacifists.

There are two distinguished ways to live out pacifism: by campaigning for nonviolent means of conflict resolution and by practising those means oneself, even at the price of suffering violence. Both ways are, and this is my point, far away from any form of withdrawal. They are attempts of peace-making in the purest sense of the word. And both are united in their categorical upholding of nonviolent means as the proper approach to conflict resolution.

This stubborn insistence on nonviolent means is what makes pacifism special with regard to just war theory and just peace theory as the other two options of peace ethics. All three have the same goal: the establishment of peace. But they are separated by their respective reflection on the proper means in order to approach this goal: while just war theory and just peace theory acknowledge that at least sometimes violence is indispensable in order to prepare peaceful settlements, pacifism rejects all recurrence to violent means from the outset.

Such an objection not to the goal of action, but to the means of approaching that goal, is not unheard of in other domains of ethics, as, for example, the discussion on emissions trading in environmental ethics. While some ethicists, for instance Michael Sandel, oppose the infiltration of market mechanisms categorically because ‘it entrenches an instrumental attitude toward nature’, ¹¹ others, like Edward Page, ¹² accept, albeit with some caveats, the need to use financial incentives in order to mitigate climate change. Sandel and Page both agree on the goal of climate policy, that is, to reduce carbon emissions in order to save the planet. They disagree, however, on the right means to accomplish this common goal. Actually, ethical debates quite often are triggered rather by dissents on means, not on goals. Therefore, they often come down to questions of effectiveness: which means is more effective in the long run to come closer to the ideal, the goal one is striving for? I will show below that the discussion in peace ethics between pacifists and defenders of just war and just peace is no exception to the rule: indeed this discussion is largely dominated by questions of effectiveness.

But before arguing further, let me briefly summarise. With regard to a definition of pacifism, I have contended:

Therefore, nonviolence is the key to any reflection on pacifism. Thus it makes sense to revisit pacifism’s discourse on violence, which I will do below.

The Burden of Nonviolence

In this section, I aim to point out inconsistencies in the pacifist discourse on violence that come about—so my hypothesis—because it is just too difficult to maintain a position of categorical nonviolence. That’s why I call this section ‘The Burden of Nonviolence’.

Let me be clear: When I speak here of ‘inconsistencies’, I do not want to reiterate the famous critique of pacifism’s logical self-refutation pronounced by Jan Narveson in 1965, slightly modified in 2006. Narveson has summarised the alleged self-contradiction in the following words: ‘Violence is wrong, and it is wrong to resist it.’ ¹³ So Narveson—again—mistakenly takes pacifism to be based on an attitude of passive non-resistance, whereas it rather is, as shown in the previous chapter, an attitude of nonviolent resistance. Non-resistance and nonviolent resistance must not be confused, as it happens unfortunately to Narveson. ¹⁴ The pacifist’s confession, rather than saying: ‘Violence is wrong, and it is wrong to resist it’, says in fact: ‘Violence is wrong, and it is wrong to resist it violently’, which is no self-contradiction at all. The big question the categorical pacifist has to face is not the question of self-refutation but the question whether the first statement is correct: is violence really in all imaginable cases of human life wrong? It is with regard to this question that I see some accommodation in ‘really existing’ pacifism, which make its discourse on violence incoherent.

The first accommodation is palpable in Anabaptist thinking from the very beginning. It entails a notion of double standards, which is a sort of self-contradiction as well, pointed out already by Narveson, ¹⁵ rightly so in this case. The problem: pacifists abstain from violence themselves, but some accept that others necessarily will use violent means in the performance of their duties as officials of public authority. This double standard is already present in the Schleitheim confession. For it accepts state violence as ordained by God: ‘The sword is ordained by God outside the perfection of Christ. It punishes and puts to death the wicked, and guards and protects the good.’ However, at the same time, the Schleitheim confession excludes Christians from being part of the political government, including juridical authority as a judge who ordains punishment. The reason given seems to be simple: ‘The government magistracy is according to the flesh, but the Christians’ is according to the Spirit.’ But how can something be ordained by God, and yet be out of the scope of God’s spirit? And doesn’t this clear distinction between the Kingdom of flesh and the Kingdom of Spirit mean that the Schleitheim confession takes precisely the position of withdrawal I have excluded in the section above? Or even worse: isn’t this a sort of hypocrisy, not to make your own hands dirty by using violence, but to rely on others who do the dirty work for you? If there is a need for state violence, and even a divine ordination of it, the pacifist dogma of nonviolence gets into trouble. To maintain it, at least conditionally, becomes a burden, and opens the way for inconsistency in thought and acts.

In the twentieth and in the early twenty-first century, pacifists have tried to remedy this double standard by speaking more positively about state violence. Institutional pacifism was the path largely trodden in the twentieth century: conflict resolution and an approach to international peace by the way of binding law and global institutions was and still is largely favoured by peace movements, not paying attention to the fact that law always goes together with the threat of sanctions for unlawful behaviour. Law without law enforcement is a toothless tiger—a fact the early Anabaptists were well aware of. Therefore, if their successors favour legal or institutional pacifism as well as ‘anti-war-ism’, they have already abandoned an approach of categorical nonviolence, due to the heavy burden of this approach.

The same is true, even more obviously, for a compromise with violence that has gained more and more interest in the world of pacifism since the end of the twentieth century: the theory of just policing. Gerald Schlabach made this his programmatic proposal in 2007, and others, like Fernando Enns, the leading theologian of the German Mennonite Church, have taken up the challenge.

The theory of just policing as a pacifist theory feeds on the difference between policing and warfare. In Schlabach’s words:

Policing seeks to secure the common good of the very society within which it operates; because it is embedded, indebted, and accountable within that community, according to the rule of law, it has an inherent tendency to minimize recourse to violence. Warfare may also seek to secure the common good of a society, of course. But because it extends beyond that society through threats to other communities, it has an inherent tendency to break out of the rule of law. It thus cuts whatever slender bonds of accountability that would truly limit its use to ‘last resort’. And this difference is only the beginning. For having cut loose, war usually jeopardizes not only the common good of international community, but even that of the society in whose name it is being waged. ¹⁶

I will later come back to Schlabach’s concrete description of the two ‘ideal types’ ¹⁷ of policing and warfare, which seems to me grossly exaggerating their differences. In this section, I only want to point out that policing, even when it is reduced to just policing, still implies the threat and the use of violence. Schlabach is very clear about that, and he establishes the (new) category of ‘honestly unfinished pacifism’ in order to get the notion of ‘just policing’ into the framework of pacifism. ¹⁸ He imagines, for example, a scenario of global active terrorists who finally have to be tracked down by ‘some kind of SWAT team with recourse to lethal violence’. ¹⁹ Schlabach admits that this clear approval of armed police missions is a shift in Mennonite thought, which in the nineteenth century still did not allow the participation of Mennonite Christians in the police. ²⁰ However, ‘9/11 certainly did dislodge neglected issues of all sorts and force even people of firm faith to examine their assumptions anew’. ²¹ The burden of nonviolence seems to be unbearable in the face of global terrorism.

Margot Käßmann, the most popular among German pacifists, goes even a step further: not completely forbidding the use of military force and not willing to have it replaced entirely by pure policing, she speaks of a small passageway of legitimised violence for the sake of peacebuilding and the defence of human rights. ²² This passageway may be as small as it could be, the cases as exceptional as can be imagined: it still is a permission of the use of military means, therefore going even beyond the intention of just policing, even more overstepping the limits of categorical nonviolence.

So we see that pacifism’s discourse on violence has quite changed over the centuries. Once a fleshly affair, not able to be legitimised at all for pacifists’ thought, the justification of at least some kind of state violence now has made it on the agenda even of the Mennonites. One may interpret this evolution as a shift from categorical to conditional pacifism, but it remains, however, a shift, and a rather strong one, given that nonviolence is the defining factor of pacifism when it comes to its distinction from the theories of just peace and just war.

The Self-begetting Violence

One of the favourite pacifist arguments against the use of violence, even when it is used for the sake of self-defence or humanitarian help, has always been the disclosure of its unpeaceful consequences: the use of violence is supposed to provoke unavoidably a reaction of violence, which then triggers another, even more violent response, and so on. Max Weber, in the ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’ of his essays on the sociology of religion, calls this connection of violence and counter-violence unavoidable. ²³ In our time, we find it expressed in the work of the pacifist Richard Hays: ‘history teaches that violence simply begets violence’. ²⁴ Margot Käßmann speaks of the ‘spiral of violence’, which can be interrupted ‘only through nonviolence’. ²⁵ Other examples could be quoted. However, in spite of its frequent use in the pacifist discourse on violence, the question must be allowed: is the dogma of the self-begetting violence correct? Does it correspond to reality or is it rather a myth?

With these questions we enter the realm of empirical considerations. Hays rightly contends that he is not in the mode of the interpreter of the Bible, but in the historian’s mode when he states that history teaches us the disastrous consequences of all resort to violence. This shift to consequences and to empirical considerations is not at all a surprise. I have stated above that nonviolence is favoured by the pacifist tradition as a means to bring about peace. And discussions about preferable means have to take into account their effectiveness. Yoder, by the way, is very clear about that when he concludes his seminal book on ‘The Politics of Jesus’ with a consideration about effectiveness:

To follow Jesus does not mean renouncing effectiveness. It does not mean sacrificing concern for liberation within the social process in favor of delayed gratification in heaven, or abandoning efficacy in favor of purity. It means that in Jesus we have a clue to which kinds of causation, which kinds of community-building, which kinds of conflict management, go with the grain of the cosmos, of which we know, as Caesar does not, that Jesus is both the Word (the inner logic of things) and the Lord (‘sitting at the right hand’). ²⁶

Narveson has clearly noted the methodological consequences of this consequentialist part of pacifism:

And, of course, that’s the catch. If one attempts to support pacifism because of its probable effects, then one’s position depends on what these effects are. Determining what they are is a purely empirical matter, and, consequently, one could not possibly be a pacifist as a matter of pure principle if his reasons for supporting pacifism are merely tactical. One must, in this case, submit one’s opinions to the governance of fact. ²⁷

So let’s submit for a moment to the governance of fact! It is indeed a common strategy I have found in today’s pacifists to point out to the millions of lives war has cost over the centuries, with the twentieth century being the bloodiest of all. And when it comes to contemporary history, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan are the usual suspects to prove the ‘evident’ failure implied in any resort to violence. On the other hand, an empirical study of Chenoweth and Stephan is recalled by pacifists in order to prove the relative success of nonviolent approaches: ‘The most striking finding is that between 1900 and 2006, nonviolent resistance campaigns were nearly twice as likely to achieve full or partial success as their violent counterparts.’ ²⁸ A recent example, not yet contained in this study, but very popular at least in the current German peace movement, is the ‘success’ of the nonviolent resistance brought upon by Liberian women who ‘prayed the devil back to hell’, according to the documentary movie with the same name. The end of the Second Civil War in Liberia back in 2003 is, therefore, accounted to the nonviolent action of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace.

But is the ‘success’ of the Liberian women indeed an undisputable ‘fact’ in the sense worked out by Narveson? Not really. It rather shows the strong entanglement of fact and interpretation, as it would be the clear expectation of anyone with some insight into the theory of knowledge. There can be no doubt that the presence of a mass of Liberian women with their white T-shirts in front of Charles Taylor’s presidential palace played a significant role in persuading him that August 2003 was a good time to begin peace negotiations with the rebel parties. However, what is usually omitted in the pacifists’ discourse on Liberia is the siege of Monrovia by the rebels, their military supremacy, and the threat that they would invade the capital and capture the president in the near future. It is impossible and unnecessary to re-enter Charles Taylor’s mind back in 2003 and to re-establish what finally urged him to enter peace negotiations—the women or the rebels—but at least it is very unlikely that the protesting women would have been the only factor in his calculation. History would rather suggest that it was fear of military defeat that urged him to give up, like so many dictators before him. This judgement is confirmed by Kofi Annan’s recollection of the two most dramatic crises of the 1990s: in both Rwanda and Bosnia the end of atrocities and successful peace negotiations were enabled by robust military interventions. ²⁹

‘Success’ is quite a difficult category to build upon. Where is the border between success and defeat? What counts as a ‘success’? And what have been the reasons for it? These largely remain open questions. Therefore, it seems to be a rather bold statement to say that military violence always leads to more violence whereas nonviolence leads to peace.

Recent studies suggest a much more nuanced picture. In the case of renewed civil wars, new outbreaks of violence seem to be independent of the way the preceding civil war has been ended, but rather influenced by the economic and political situation in the country in times of peace. ³⁰ Another study, established some years ago by the Frankfurt Peace Research Institute, deals with military humanitarian interventions. ³¹ Thorsten Gromes and Matthias Dembinski have investigated their outcome between 1947 and 2005, an intervention being defined as an involvement of military from abroad after 200 or more casualties in a civil war. ³² The result is not enthusiastic, but still, Gromes and Dembinski make the case that a third of the wars came to an end after such an intervention and that the number of casualties significantly decreased. Again: this is no ‘proof’ that military interventions are ‘better’ than other means to end violence and mass atrocities. The two researchers strongly plead for a case by case approach in situations of massive violence. But this is definitely something different from the pacifist ‘dogma’ which stipulates that violence—and a military humanitarian intervention is an act of violence, of course—always begets new and more atrocious violence.

So I note as the result of this chapter: it is a commonplace in pacifism to point out the negative consequences of violent responses to violence. However, there is a lot of prejudice in this interpretation of history. It remains rather open whether nonviolent or violent answers are more ‘successful’. Done and followed up in the right way, military operations can put an end to violence. Therefore, the simple dogma in pacifism that ‘violence always begets violence’ seems to be untenable. It is rather a myth than reality.

What the Military Thinks and Does

Pacifism not only has prejudices about the consequences of violent responses to violence. Pacifism’s discourse has also a clear opinion about the persons who argue for and participate in a limited resort to violence under certain circumstances. Walter Wink speaks of the ‘myth of redemptive violence’ that has shaped humanity since the times of ancient Mesopotamia. ‘Redemptive violence gives way to violence as an end in itself—not a religion that uses violence in the pursuit of order and salvation, but a religion in which violence has become the ultimate concern, an elixir, sheer titillation, an addictive high, a substitute for relationships.’ ³³ The military plays, according to Wink, a significant role in this culture of saving violence, insofar as it provides security in and out the ‘National Security State’. ³⁴ According to Andy Alexis-Baker, service in the military comes down to ‘state-sponsored killing’. ³⁵

The prejudice against the military is also very present in Schlabach’s concept of just policing. Let’s recall Schlabach’s portrayal of warfare—and nothing else than warfare is, according to Schlabach, the main task of the military:

Warfare may also seek to secure the common good of a society, of course. But because it extends beyond that society through threats to other communities, it has an inherent tendency to break out of the rule of law. It thus cuts whatever slender bonds of accountability that would truly limit its use to ‘last resort’. And this difference is only the beginning. For having cut loose, war usually jeopardizes not only the common good of international community, but even that of the society in whose name it is being waged. ³⁶

We find here a variation of the violence dogma examined in the last chapter: Any attempt to wage a just and limited war is vain, because war has a natural tendency to expand its limits in escalation. War, once begun, automatically becomes a total war. What may begin as a ‘just war’, will end as a ‘crusade’. ³⁷

To prove this statement, Schlabach recurs to the ‘psycho-social dynamics’ of war, which appear to be ‘very different’ from those of policing. ³⁸ This is an important point indeed. Not long ago, Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer have shown, in their review of informal talks of German soldiers during World War II, the extent to which the different framing of war changes their perception of the ‘enemy’. ³⁹ There is, as Anscombe put it, a greater probability of malice in warfare than in the actions of a police force. ⁴⁰ A probability, however, is not a necessity.

The question is, on the one hand, whether a violent and degrading picture of the enemy comes up automatically when joining the military or whether it can be civilised by education. The doctrine of ‘Innere Führung’ (‘Internal Guidance’), established in the army of Western Germany after 1955, at least aims at such a civilisation. Other armies have their moral codes as well. ⁴¹ David Fisher, in his valuable appropriation of the just war doctrine for the twenty-first century, has put specific emphasis on the politicians’ and soldiers’ task of behaving justly during a war. ⁴² All these efforts can refer to a long-standing tradition of humanitarian law of conflict, cumulating in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their additional protocols.

On the other hand, there is the question whether a violent and hostile perception of the other is reduced to the military. A friend of mine, who worked as a physician in a prison for some time, has witnessed a guardian saying to him when depositing one of the inmates at the medical unit: ‘I bring you this shit.’ This is at least verbal violence, and we probably all have heard about incidents when prison guardians or policemen use unwarranted physical violence as well. Is it really possible to draw a clear line between ‘bad’ military violence and ‘good’ police violence, as Schlabach does?

Schlabach confirms his negative portrayal of the military, the ‘discontinuity between … police function and … military function’, ⁴³ when he stipulates: ‘Military weapons and organizations are designed to be expeditionary’. ⁴⁴ Once again, this is a very bold statement, simply wrong at least for the German army which was designed for pure self-defence and the maintaining of peace under the Cold War’s doctrine of deterrence—a doctrine which arguably contributed to the rather peaceful development of Europe after 1945. It is also worth mentioning that a lot of military weapons are not ‘designed to be expeditionary’, but for defensive purposes, the most famous example being perhaps the Patriot missile system that allowed Israel to defend against Iraqi missiles back in the 1991 Gulf War. Therefore, it is too simplistic a myth that both military weapons and organisations ‘are designed to be expeditionary’, as Schlabach contends.

Schlabach’s aim when drawing such a caricature of the military is quite clear: after having made the concession of arguing at least for limited violence in the hands of police forces, the military must swallow all the negative thoughts about state violence that Schlabach has inherited from the pacifist tradition. It would be better if he accepted, as Käßmann does, that there are at least some situations when just policing is not enough to save the lives of the innocent. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda back in 1994, has said numerous times that a limited number of enhancement troops would have been enough for him to stop the violence developing into a genocide. Without these additional troops, his mission remained rather a police mission, with inadequate means to resist the violence, and he was forced to remain an almost entirely passive spectator of the slaughter. The failure of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), as it is reported by Dallaire in his book Shake Hands with the Devil, is the failure of any concept of ‘just policing’ with inefficient means. ⁴⁵

There is, certainly, a need to educate ethically responsible soldiers. And even the best educated armies are by far no unambiguous means in the case of violent conflicts. But what has to be seen by pacifists like Schlabach is at least that the military option can be a valuable option in violent situations. Sometimes a genocide can be stopped by military violence, sometimes it cannot. And, as all doctrines of just war emphasise: military violence can only be a last resort. Nonviolent means have to be preferred, if ever possible. That is a standard piece of just war doctrine, because an ethically justified war has the same goal as any pacifist statement: to bring about peace. Not many just war theorists will agree with Wink’s idea of a saving violence. They will rather say that in some cases military violence is the only way to counter existing violence. This may be—hopefully—life-saving, but it is not an end in itself. It ends violence and thus only prepares for the next step on the road to peace, without any pretention of ‘salvation’. Instead of arguing against the proponents of the idea of a just war by over-emphasising a categorical and intrinsic corruptness of the military, pacifists should rather focus on the common goal that unites both camps: the wish for a peaceful world.

Conclusion

I have tried to show the pitfalls of pacifism’s discourse on violence, its incoherencies and its hidden myths. This may seem to be a destructive approach, and so I want to finish this article by stating my utmost respect for those who put peace and nonviolence in the very first place of their thinking. Their case would be even better if they accepted that the striving for peace cannot be based on myths. It requires an interdisciplinary case by case approach and the questioning of some very dear dogmas.