Quaker Quicks - Why I am a Pacifist: A Call For A More Nonviolent World

Quaker Quicks - Why I am a Pacifist: A Call For A More Nonviolent World

by Tim Gee
Quaker Quicks - Why I am a Pacifist: A Call For A More Nonviolent World

Quaker Quicks - Why I am a Pacifist: A Call For A More Nonviolent World

by Tim Gee

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Overview

Tim Gee tells the story of why he became a pacifist and what it means to him. Gee reflects on the lives of peacemakers past and present to provide responses to questions like “Don’t we have to hit back if we're hurt?”, “Don’t we need war to respond to evil?” and “Doesn’t religion justify wars?”. This is a critique of war, but more than that, it stakes a claim for pacifism's feminist and anti-racist qualities. This is a call for a more nonviolent world.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781789040166
Publisher: Collective Ink
Publication date: 10/01/2019
Pages: 88
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Tim Gee is a writer and campaigner. His first book, Counterpower, shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Prize for radical non-fiction, explored movements for change through history. He has written for The Guardian, New Internationalist and the Independent, and has worked for Friends of the Earth, Christian Aid, Quaker Peace and Social Witness. Gee lives in London, UK.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Why I am a pacifist

I call myself a pacifist. I haven't always done so and I sometimes hesitate to if I think I might be misunderstood. But with a short book ahead of me to explain what I mean, I say with confidence: I am a pacifist – by which I mean that I try to play my part in making peace by nonviolent means.

Perhaps my pacifism hasn't yet been fully tested. I haven't been a soldier or a resident of a country invaded by another nor been forced in to the military through conscription. Nevertheless, as a resident of a country which drops bombs on other countries, sells weapons to governments engaged in human rights abuse and is complicit in climate change – causing perhaps the largest process of global violence imaginable – I feel a responsibility to speak out and do what I can to work for peace.

I am a pacifist first and foremost because of a profound physiological, psychological and spiritual sense that I couldn't kill another person and that to inflict pain on others is wrong. Different cultures have used different words and explanations for this feeling. Within many world religions and cultures there is a group that feels likewise. In Britain – where I live and grew up – perhaps the best known is the Quaker community of which I am part. I declare my background from the start, and have no doubt my outlook has been shaped by my experience of this community. But true to the nondoctrinal, non-creedal tradition it is also a position I have come to myself.

When approached to write this book, I was asked if I might offer something about campaigning and activism. On reflection, I asked if might explore pacifism instead, precisely because it is the root of why I act. It isn't called 'Why you should be a pacifist' or 'why we should all be pacifists' even though I hope that both you and we all one day will. In the spirit of the idea that we are each engaged on a personal journey, the only truth I can authentically speak to is my own, through my process of action and reflection so far.

How I became a pacifist

I haven't always been a pacifist. I got into a lot of fights at school. I didn't start them. If a fight broke out everyone would leave what they were doing and crowd around to form an improvised boxing ring, cheering the likely victors on. Being a fairly tall person, I could usually hold my own. In so doing, like many other boys, I expressed my schoolyard belief that masculinity relies on the willingness to engage in physical combat.

My friendship group was mostly other boys from the Manchester rock music subculture. Although increasingly sure that I wasn't gay myself, I wasn't experienced enough to be certain. The fact that the artists we admired were often androgynous, and the fact it was OK in our group to be gay, meant that the attacks on us had a strongly homophobic tone: 'Moshers!', 'Homos!', 'Poofs'. And so it continued, right through to the final day. At morning break we went to our hangout place, to find it covered with graffiti. A minute later, some boys whizzed past armed with eggs, which they lobbed in our direction. It was a direct hit on our heads. The insides dribbled down our faces and clothes.

'This is it,' we said. 'That's enough.' We thought that if we didn't do something about this now, we'd never get the chance and it was time to teach them a lesson. So, we piled into an older student's car, skipped the morning's lessons to get showered, then stopped by on the way back to the school to the nearest cash-and-carry to buy as many eggs as we could. At the beginning of lunchtime, we were ready.

Fizzy with nerves we walked up to our assailants' smoking area as calmly as we could and started throwing eggs. As our missiles hit their targets, it was as if an army started charging towards us. Within minutes the entire school yard seemed to have descended into a riot and we turned tail and ran. Punches were raining down on us more than ever before.

We escaped to the car again and drove around the corner, shaking all over and patting one another on the back for our bravery. We stopped at a grass verge where we drew medals on one another's shirts. There was something in that act which affected me. I felt sick to the depths of my stomach, then the sensation washed right over me – perhaps even from beyond me – that what I had done was wrong. Sure, it was only eggs, not stones, not bombs. But nevertheless, I found myself thinking that this is how wars begin. I know now that this realisation would change my life. That was the day I became a pacifist.

I didn't have words for that feeling at that time and I wish I might have found an accessible introductory book to pacifist ideas. Fifteen years later, this reflection is an attempt to fill the gap, in a quest to interpret through writing what began as the instinctive promptings of a heartfelt truth.

What is pacifism?

The word pacifist is not widely understood. Culture shapes language, which in turn shapes the way we think and the decisions we make. That we speak of 'nonviolence' reveals that within our culture, violence is the norm. We do not refer to war as 'nonpeace'.

We do, however, have the word pacifist. Even that, though, has come to be most often defined as what it is not – as a refusal to engage in violence. Sometimes it is intentionally misconstrued as a synonym for passivity, or even pacification. At its root though, pacifism means the act of making peace. As such it describes an active process.

Whilst blurring the meaning of pacifism is sometimes the intention of advocates of war, it does touch on a historic tension, still reflected today in movements for peace. As nonviolence educator David Gee (no relation) explains, we find the root of the English word 'peace' in the Latin word pax meaning agreement – in the sense of the word pact – and the Indo-European pag meaning 'fetter' or 'chain'. Those with an interest in classical history will be familiar with the 'Pax Romana' – an imperial peace without justice imposed by Rome militarily on its empire.

That is not the only way to understand the word though: Also translated into English as 'peace' is the Hebrew word shalom and the Arabic salaam. This more spiritual sense denotes 'wholeness, abundance, health, wellbeing – the integrity of our common aliveness'. Understood this way a commitment to peace encompasses a commitment to equality, economic justice and environmental protection. In contrast the origin of the word violence is to 'break'.

The introduction of the word 'pacifist' to the English language is often traced to a speech about a system of international arbitration to resolve conflicts given to the universal peace congress of 1910 which spoke of the need for a word to denote work for a positive peace – rather than mere 'anti-warism'. In the shadow of the First World War though, popular understanding of the word narrowed to mean mere nonparticipation in war – the exact definition it had been coined as an alternative to.

I often wish we had a better word. In an online video titled 'Why I Am Not a Pacifist' in the QuakerSpeak series, Kristina Keefe-Perry shares how the word 'pacifist' is too small for what she would like it to mean, falling short of the revolutionary possibilities implied in Jesus' teaching against the multifaceted violence of poverty and greed, as well as war. 'Shalomist' and 'pacificist' are amongst the words used to convey shades of variety in approaches to work for peace. Rather than attempting to create a new word though, this book is an attempt to reclaim the word we've got.

To explain why I am a pacifist, I should begin by explaining what I mean by it. When I talk about pacifism I am talking about a commitment to not killing, not supporting killing and trying to undo the systems and structures that lead to killing. It doesn't simply mean going on peace protests every so often, then getting on with business as usual in-between. Even if our actions are imperfect in the present, we can each have a role creating the conditions where peace can thrive. So too it is a commitment to working for justice. Until that time comes we could probably think of the absence of fighting simply as a 'truce' rather than true peace.

This is a pacifism rooted in spirituality, reflected in the words of the best known early Quaker George Fox who declared that he 'lived in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars'. Already in prison for what we might nowadays call acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, Fox's incarceration was extended for refusing to enlist in the army. In so doing he acted as an inspiration, pattern and example to thousands of Quakers – amongst many others – who have worked, struggled and sometimes suffered for their deeply held conviction that it is wrong to kill.

The Peace Testimony

The Quaker commitment to work for peace is usually traced to the 1660s. As the story goes, Quaker leader Margaret Fell rode by horseback from Cumbria to London where she petitioned the king not to oppress the still nascent movement. The document she presented declared the Society of Friends 'a people that follow after those things that make for peace, love and unity'; and who 'bear our testimony against all strife, and wars and contentions that come from the lusts that war in the members, that war in the soul'. From those early days onwards, Friends have seen war as a product of human greed ('lusts in the soul'). Simplicity is counted alongside peace, integrity, community and equality in the inter-related list of Quaker testimonies.

If you visit a Quaker Meeting you'll find at least someone engaged in peace work; maybe peace education, conflict-resolution, nonviolent activism or humanitarian relief. On occasion you'll meet someone who has followed different peace-leadings perhaps as an army chaplain or an advisor to a peacekeeping force. If you were to meet Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge you would be talking with a (now former) Deputy Minister of Defence.

How can it be then that one of the world's historic peace churches can also contain such variety of pathways to peace? In response, Quakers often tell a story which has attained the status of fable. It concerns William Penn who is best known as founder of the US state of Pennsylvania (also often supposed to be the model for the man on the Quaker Oats packets, which – let me clarify here – has no connection at all to the Society of Friends). Penn became a convinced Quaker in his youth, but still carried a sword, as was then the custom for men of his background. He asked George Fox whether he should continue to do so, and received the reply 'I advise thee to wear it as long as thou canst.' When they next met, Penn was no longer armed. When Fox asked where his sword was, Penn replied 'I have taken thy advice; I wore it as long as I could.' The ongoing popularity of the story sheds light more clearly on the Quaker approach to peace; to each seek inward peace in the company of a Quaker Meeting or private contemplation, and to listen for the guidance of the inner light.

This does not imply a rejection of conflict. Indeed, another early manifestation of the Peace Testimony was a project called The Lamb's War. A book of the same name by James Naylor gave articulation to the movement's practice of encouraging people to turn away from the words of those church ministers who endorsed war and injustice and instead to listen to the inner light – the Light of Christ, the Lamb, which would lead people away from violent acts towards action for peace. Although this led to severe repression, including large numbers of Quakers being beaten, jailed and in some cases killed, the persecution appeared only to add to the movement's strength, resolve and numbers.

The Lamb's War could be seen as an anticipation of modern day nonviolent civil disobedience, echoed in the twentieth century, for example, by English suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst who proclaimed that 'the true pacifist is a rebel against the present organisation of society, and only as we ... despise the gain of privilege and oppression shall our feet be guided in the way of peace.' So too it can be heard in the words of Martin Luther King who in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, called out for criticism 'the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice'.

King's friend and advisor Bayard Rustin helped popularise the phrase 'speak truth to power'. In another memorable quotation he eloquently captures how pacifism is the very opposite of passivity, declaring: 'We need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers. Our power is in our ability to make things unworkable. The only weapon we have is our bodies and we need to tuck them in places so the wheels won't turn.'

Conflict happens as soon as two or more people have different interests. Practitioners of peace frequently say that conflict is essential for human progress and for confronting injustice. The challenge of peacemaking is to do it in a way that respects human life.

But perhaps it is easier said than done. Are there circumstances in which an opponent is so evil that war itself is needed to bring about peace?

CHAPTER 2

War is the greater evil

Almost everyone old enough to remember knows where they were on 11 September 2001. The smoking buildings. People running and screaming. Bodies falling from height. Fireballs in the streets. Over and over again, the images of planes flying into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York were replayed on television. In all nearly 3000 people died, broadcast into people's living rooms across the world.

Before the day was out, US President George W. Bush gave an address in which he used the word 'evil' four times. Then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair took to the airwaves, promising not to rest 'until this evil is driven from our world'. A 'War on Terror' was declared, and nine days later the US began bombing Afghanistan with UK support. Despite it having no connection to the 9/11 attacks, Bush then sought to extend the war to other countries which he termed an 'axis of evil', including Iraq. So rarely far from the headlines, the question of evil seemed difficult to avoid.

The language of evil isn't much used by Quakers – at least not within the liberal tradition of which I am part. Ask a Quaker what they believe and the chances are they'll say something about working for peace and something about that of God residing in all (that of good for more secular Friends). The two statements are connected. If all people have within them a divine spark, then by extension we are all equal and it doesn't make sense for some people to claim justification for killing others.

What about the idea that we each have evil within us as well? A Quaker might answer that evil is not so much a force as an absence, or lack of openness to the Light. Another might reply that even if we do each have evil within us, then it still makes no sense to suppress it through killing, which then really would lead to a war of all against all.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the aversion to the language of evil, the word is used 44 times in the spiritual anthology Quaker Faith and Practice, which reflects and shapes the lives of Quakers in Britain. Within it contributors name inequality, involuntary unemployment, homelessness, torture, slavery, fascism and war as societal evils perhaps at their most dangerous when they are so deep rooted that they can become, 'accepted, even by the best minds, as part of the providential ordering of life'.

The idea of war itself as an evil is difficult to square with the characterisation so often presented by politicians – of evil existing only on the other side of a conflict, capable of possessing people to the extent that that it can only be suppressed through organised violence.

Calculating the cost

There are some who offer a more nuanced view, justifying war in some instances as the 'lesser of two evils', as was argued at the outset of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This approach invites people to assess which evil outweighs the other, but exactly how to do this remains unclear. To stay with the case of the 'War on Terror'; there was no official body count in Afghanistan, but even the lower estimates suggest that the invasion caused the death of 3000 people in the first few years, rising to tens of thousands in the years that followed. A survey counting only reported deaths emerging from the Iraq War names a figure of 268,000 – at least 17,000 of whom were killed directly by US-led forces. At the upper end, it has been suggested that the figure could be more than a million.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Why I Am a Pacifist"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Tim Gee.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Preface, 1,
Chapter 1: Why I am a pacifist, 3,
Chapter 2: War is the greater evil, 10,
Chapter 3: Thou shalt not kill, 15,
Chapter 4: The power of nonviolence, 22,
Chapter 5: Gender, sexuality and peace, 29,
Chapter 6: Pacifism and anti-racism, 36,
Chapter 7: Towards a nonviolent economy, 42,
Chapter 8: Never again?, 48,
Chapter 9: But what would you do if ..., 58,
References, 63,
About the Author, 73,

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