Those who’d like a book that describes why pacifists get it wrong like this may want to read a new G. K. Chesterton collection I edited, Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II.
According to Chesterton, among the ideas and movements that lead to dictatorship and war is modern pacifism for: “Pacifism and Prussianism [militarism] are always in alliance, by a fatal logic far beyond any conscious conspiracy.”
He goes on to explain why the logic of pacifism drives in to ignore brutal military aggressors and to slander peaceful democracies and their soldiers, while advocating unworkable solutions to the problem of war (primarily broad international institutions). Keep in mind that he is describing pacifist behavior in the closing days of World War I. Pacifism’s dreadful behaviors didn’t begin with the Vietnam or Iraqi wars. It flows from the core principles of modern pacifism, particularly its assumption that global peace is achievable.
In 1932, Chesterton warned that Hitler would become dictator in Germany and drive his nation toward a war that would begin over a border dispute with Poland–precisely what happened seven years later. In one telling argument written that year, he warned that if the “Young Men” of World War I who now ran British politics didn’t find a way to deter Hitler, they would see a “New War” that would make the first look like nothing.
To give you a sample of Chesterton genius with words and ideas, here are two quotes among many. The second, written as the public grew weary of war in late 1916, almost perfectly describes our situation in Iraq today.
“That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon.”
“We have reached a particular point in the present war at which it is supremely necessary to stretch our minds, so as to take in the large things and not merely the small. For it is not too much to say that the large things are going right and the small things are going wrong. Pessimism or even panic can be created by a simple trick of mental contraction.”
–Michael W. Perry, Seattle
