QuakerInfo.com Forum

[sorianofan]

I for one believe non-violence is 99.99% of the time is good. However, the very possibility that 0.01% of the time violence is good troubles me.

Good begets good and evil begets evil, but could evil ever beget good and the other way around?

Here's my example. During World War II, the Nazi had an extermination camp at Sobibor. The camp had killed about 200-300 thousand jews by 1943. At the camp there were a dozen or so SS and 125 Ostruppen collaborators and 600 Jewish workers who were not immediately killed, though their demise was a matter of time. Now, what happened was that these 600 prisoners with the help of Russian Jewish POWs killed several SS and staged an escape from the camp.

They certainly killed some people and about half of the jews in the camp died during the escape. That was evil, because killing is evil.

However, their escape stalled camp activities, which saved Jewish lives right from the get go. Furthermore, we now know in retrospect that the closure of the camp (because of the escape) saved untold hundreds of thousands of lives.

So, here are my questions:

Was the escape from the camp evil?
Would not violently resisting the Nazis in Sobibor be good?
Was violence in this situation good or evil?

I believe that non-violence is the way to go, and our inability to accurately gauge the 0.01% might discount all violent intent by sheer numbers. However, are these assumptions correct? Is all violence inherently wrong no matter is justification and is it impossible to ever correctly decide when to be violent?

Thanks for your input!
_________________
Cats rule and that is the truth.

[BillSamuel]

We can't rerun an event with different actions, and see what would have happened, nor can we possibly know what all the ramifications were of the actions that were taken. What other possibilities might there have been in this particular situation? I don't know. The people cited did what seemed best to them in that situation. We should not be quick to judge them.

I believe that Christ gives us a new heart in which we see things very differently. When Fox was invited to be a captain in Cromwell's army, he reported that he "lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars." And also that he "was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strife were."

So the peace witness started as an expression of who we are in Christ, not as a position on actions of nation states or an evaluation of what will be effective in the world. And it ties into the Quaker belief that we are really called to live the Kingdom of God on earth. Quakers believed that Christ made it possible for us to come back to the way humans were before the "Fall" - the way God intended for us to live and the way pointed as coming back in a number of passages of scripture, including the Peaceable Kingdom vision in Isaiah.

The way to not just pray "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" but to work towards that reality is to live in the Kingdom of God now, as foolish as that may seem. Another way to put it is we have to be the Kingdom to bring about the Kingdom.
_________________
Bill Samuel, Silver Spring, MD, USA
Co-Coordinator, Friends in Christ

[sorianofan]

Is it less evil to avoid doing evil out of principal or to do evil for the sake of preventing evil? I would think the former is the honest and better choice, but does God compel us to then follow such principle in every single instance?
_________________
Cats rule and that is the truth.

[Patrocles]

I wouldn't go so far to decide which is better or worse with regard to ethics.

I've always thought that the peace testimony is basically a promise to be kept. First, for a Jew or Christian it's God's promise to mankind: "I don't want the death of the godless" (Ez. 18,23). So jewish or christian pacifists only testify by their actions what God has promised.

Secondly, for a Quaker, the peace testimony of 1660 was, in its context, obviously a promise, namely the promise that Quakers wouldn't take part in a revolt against King Charles II as well as in other holy or secular wars. So Quakers are imho a community around a promise to be kept ("rightly or wrongly").

Or is that too simplistic a view?

[sorianofan]

I would hate to be unjust, be a bad citizen, and worse yet, judged for my unrighteousness by God for the sake of a "mere" promise, even one so profound. This is why the question troubles me. On one hand, we have a history of viloence begetting violence, evil begetting evil. Yet, if we were stared by evil in the face, with seemingly no way around it, but violence, are we being jhust, unjust, or just plain hasty? I'm leaning towards there is simply no universal answer, because it is a matter of the situation.
_________________
Cats rule and that is the truth.

[Patrocles]

Whatever you do in such a situation - you wouldn't be innocent, but guilty (of the pain or unhappiness you have inflicted by your activity or your passivity).
So I think I would accept the guilt and keep the promise (i.e. not abuse the trust of the other one).

[CelticNorth]

This question was at the forefront of the dilema facing the State of Pennsylvania, which was founded by William Penn and other Quakers, as whether to join the the Constitutional Convention, sever ties with England, and face possible war. Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man" is still relevant to to that question.

[Neil Kiernan]

I was kind of curious what would of happend to Quakers who were drafted and sent to war.

In my personal beliefs I don't feel that pacifism is realistic or natural. However, it is equally unatural to seek out violence for no reason. Animals do commit violence on each other in the cycle of nature. They do not however construct elaborate devices to destroy each other in a mass scale.

If everyone on the earth had been a pacifist when Hitler and the Japanese Empire decided to take over, the Nazis and the Japanese would of ruled the world. I firmly believe they probably would of then set about fighting each other. But life for anyone who got in their way would of been horrible, and the Jewish race would of become extinct, along with the Gypsies, and anyone else who did not hold the qualities of the "master race". I cannot believe for a moment that this would of been your Gods's will.

That is why I follow a philosphy, some problems cannot be solved with a sword. But some problems cannot be solved without one.

[Shay]

[oneputt]

Should we stand by and watch a woman get raped because we don't believe in using violence to stop it?Should a child be allowed to be abused because the abuser refuses to listen to reason and blows off all who try to intervene peacefully?Is there a point in which using the excuse of pacifism actually causes harm in itself?Yes,there is,and it is a blind spot of extreme pacifists that they don't see this.Allowing harm to come to innocents that you could prevent by forceful intervention if it was the last resort is a sin in itself,no matter how nobly it is presented.

[Shay]

[oneputt]

I don't believe I said it bothers me.This is a discussion area,and that is what I was doing.Discussing is not synonomous with agreeing,however.

Feel free to link whatever posts of mine you like.I stand by each and every one.But the conclusions you draw from the ones you did link are poorly made.I have said I believe in pacifism in all but the most extreme cases of defending the innocent and helpless from harm,and that I am not a member of a Quaker meeting because the closest one is about 4 hours from me,not because I disagree with much of it.And if you will bother to check Quakerism worldwide,I am in agreement with the Christianity of most Quakers far more than the liberals here who deny the divinity of Christ.

[Barbara]

I think that even those who call themselves pacifists, if they are honest about it, know that humility is called for, and it is in humility that I offer these observations.

As Bill said, we cannot judge the past. I find it interesting that as soon as someone speaks of pacifism or nonviolence, some abomination of the Nazi era (and there were a lot of them!) or some other really extreme case is brought up as a challenge, almost as a way of backing the person trying to discuss nonviolent alternatives into a corner. Personally, I think that these extreme cases divert attention from what those who work to spread the teachings of nonviolence are trying to do, namely, prevent such extreme conditions, where the only option is kill or be killed, from happening... or even from happening as often.

I am also baffled by the attitude that we bring to the issues of violence in our societies and armed conflict between nations. We often do not bring an attitude of hope, of progress, to the problem. For instance, if we think of all the horrible epidemics of history --smallpox, polio, etc. -- we poured money into research and we honor those who came up with a way to eradicate those diseases so that future generations would not have to die from them. But with war, we almost seem to have the opposite attitude: it's every generations duty to sacrifice some of its members in war.

With regard to the Holocaust, I think it is useful to remember that it did not happen in a vacuum and that (as James Carroll documents in his book Constantine's Sword),it was the culmination of centuries of hatred and violence against Jews, violence often sanctioned by the dominant religious institutions of the time. Who expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, but the good Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, for instance? And it was Pope Paul IV who instituted the first ghettos -- areas to which Jews were relegated [see http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Rome.html ] in 1555.

OK, here I'm in the realm of the imaginary, I freely admit-- but what if the people of Germany had decided that the Nuremberg Laws were unjust and had refused to abide by them? Those laws laid the foundation for the trips to the death chambers... Note that the ghettos of Rome were the models of "those imposed by Nazi Germany on the Jews during World War II."[ see again: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Rome.html ]

I guess what I'm getting at is that maybe we should begin to look at hatred and violent conflict as learned behaviors and as situations that often have their roots in past behaviors and events.

As the song from South Pacific goes,

[Neil Kiernan]

When I stated that if the majority of the people in the world were pacifists the Nazis would of ruled the world, what I meant was if people outside of Germany and Japan were pacifists. The Nazi political party was extremely powerful. The Japanese believed that their emperor was their god. I don't honestly believe that a pacifistic way of thinking would flourish in either of those settings. As the Japanese way of life was always very warlike. And Hitler was very good at making hate justified to his people.

If the rest of the world were pacifists, I have no doubt that Hitler would of taken every Jew he could get his hands on and put them to death. He would of then moved on to any other group that got in his way.

The Japanese government would of invaded China, and the rest of the east and committed many of the atrocities that most people don't know about on those people as well.

It was only by taking up the sword that these two great threats to humanity were stopped.

And if left unchecked, although I don't believe this is why our government went to war in Iraq, Saddam Husien would still be using Mustard Gas on Kurdish women and Children.

I agree with you that teaching non-violence would help prevent these disasters. And I think that those tactics have in many ways already succeeded. The attitude of the world is much more hesitant to go to war on a global scale. But peace is equally maintained through the threat of reprisal. And I don't feel that will ever change.

[BillSamuel]

While they weren't necessarily pacifists, the Danes and the Norwegians practiced widespread nonviolent resistance against the Nazis, resulting in saving many Jews.

The culture promotes the idea that the most effective resistance against evil is violence, particularly the more heinous the evildoers seem. However, a rational look at the evidence casts great doubt on this theory.
_________________
Bill Samuel, Silver Spring, MD, USA
Co-Coordinator, Friends in Christ