Document – Excerpt from Aldous Huxley, An Encyclopedia of Pacifism (1937)

biology and war

War is often described as a Law of Nature. This is not true. Among the lower animals war is unknown. True, there are carnivores which prey upon other animals; but their activities are no more war-like than are the activities of fishermen or butchers. Moreover, the existence of carnivores should not blind us to the fact that there is at least as much co-operation in nature as strife.

Individuals of the same species often fight together; but these fights are seldom pushed to a finish; the conquered is rarely killed or even permanently hurt. Such duels waged in the heat of passion, under the stress of hunger or sexual impulse, are quite unlike war, which is mass murder, scientifically prepared in cold blood.

In nature, it is only among the social insects, such as the ants and termites, that we meet with anything resembling war. And even here the resemblance is only superficial. Insect wars are conducted by members of one species against members of another species. Man is only the creature to organize mass murder of his own species.

It is often argued that war is inevitable, since man is descended from pugnacious ancestors, akin to the gorilla. This is probably not the case. Most zoologists are now of the opinion that man’s ancestor was not a gorilla-like ape, but a gentle, sensitive creature, something like a tarsier. In any case, the gifts which brought man his extraordinary biological success were not ruthlessness and brute strength (plenty of animals are much stronger and fiercer than he is), but co-operation, intelligence, wondering curiosity and sensitiveness. In the words of Charles Darwin, “The small strength and speed of man and his want to natural weapons are more than counterbalanced, firstly, by his intellectual faculties (chiefly or exclusively gained for the benefit of the community), and secondly, by those social qualities which led him to give and receive aid from his fellowmen.”

Another biological argument often invoked in defence of war is the following: War is civilization’s equivalent of natural selection; it acts as nature’s pruning-hook, ensuring the survival of the fittest. This is obviously untrue. War tends to kill off the young and healthy and children. In the second place, there is no reason to suppose that warlike peoples are superior to unwarlike peoples. Even if the violent were to survive (and war is just as likely to kill them off as to ensure the persistence of their stock), this would not necessarily mean the survival of the most satisfactory type of human being. The most violent are not the best human beings; nor, conversely, are the most valuable necessarily the strongest. In so far as war is an agent of selection it selects dysgenically, ensuring the survival, not of the more desirable, but of the less desirable human strains. In the past war’s capacity to do harm was limited by the fact that the instruments of destruction at men’s disposal were crude and inadequate. To-day, thanks to technological progress, they are enormously efficient. War, therefore, has not become as dangerous to human societies, and even to the whole human species, as cancer is to the human body. War is “natural” to exactly the same extent as cancer is “natural.”

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communism and fascism

The way in which violence begets violence is very clearly illustrated by the history of the rise of Communism and Fascism. The Communist revolution in Russia was the fruit of violence. Tsarist tyranny had prepared the ground, sowing hatred and resentment among the oppressed masses. In 1917 the fabric of Russian society had been reduced to chaos by the impact of war. Military violence gave the revolutionaries their opportunity; violently, they seized it. More military violence, in the shape of the White Russian and allied attacks upon the Bolsheviks, confirmed the new régime in its essentially anti-pacifist principles. Marxian theory had from the first insisted upon the necessity of violence; but even if they had not desired to do so, circumstances would have compelled the Bolsheviks to put the Marxian theory of violence into practice. Communism became a militant, even a militaristic creed.

Communist violence in Italy, itself produced in large measure by the disruptive violence of war, evoked violent reaction. Fascism was born and, after a period of civil strife, came to power.

In the case of Germany, the allies were given ample opportunity to behave with justice and generosity; but, during the fifteen years which preceded the accession of Hitler, Germany was treated with consistent injustice. Such concessions as were made were always made reluctantly and so late that they never did anything to allay the bitterness of German public opinion. In Nazism, Frenchmen and Englishmen are reaping the fruits of their governments’ stupid inhumanity and injustice. Hitler’s violence is the answer to the arrogance of France and England and, to a less extent, to the militant propaganda of Russian Communism—itself, as we have seen, a product of earlier violence.

Anti-Communists call upon us to suppress Communism by violence; anti-Fascists exhort us to answer the threats of Nazism with counter-threats. Both parties would have us reply to violence with violence. In other words both would have us do precisely those things which, as the history of the last twenty years makes so abundantly clear, are certain to produce the greatest possible amount of tyranny, war and civil strife. Pacifists are people who profit by the lessons of history; militarists, whether of the right or the left, are people who are determined not to learn by experience. (See Revolution; Civil War.)

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morality of pacifism

It is often objected that pacifism is morally unjustifiable. “Your position in society,” the critic of pacifism argues, “is that of a parasite. You are profiting by what the armed forces of your country are doing to preserve you and your family from danger but you refuse to undertake defence work yourself and you try to persuade others to follow your example. You have no right to take from the society in which you live without giving anything in return.”

Several answers to these criticisms present themselves:

(1) In the contemporary world, the armed forces of a country do not provide its inhabitants with protection. On the contrary, their existence is one of the principal sources of national danger. There is no more effective way of provoking people to attack than to threaten them. At the present time Great Britain combines extreme vulnerability with formidable aggressive armament. Our policy of rearmament with weapons of aggression is one which positively invites attack. The pacifist is criticized as a shirker who seeks security behind a line of soldiers, sailors and airmen, whom he refuses to help. In reality, his dearest wish is to get rid of the soldiers, sailors and airmen, and all their machinery of destruction; for he knows that so long as they are there, security will be unattainable. Tanks, bombers and battleships do not give security; on the contrary, they are a constant source of danger.

(2) Those who accuse pacifists of being parasites upon the society in which they live should pause for a moment to consider a few facts and figures. Since the last war this country has spent sixteen hundred millions of pounds upon its armaments, and the rate of expenditure is now to be increased. The world as a whole spends nearly two thousand millions a year on its “defence forces.” These “defence forces” live at the expense of the working community, performing no constructive work, absorbing an increasing amount of the world’s energy and not only failing to provide the individual citizens of the various nations with adequate protection, but actually inviting attack from abroad. To the inhabitant of a bombarded London it will be no satisfaction to learn that the planes for which he has been paying so heavily in taxation are bombarding some foreign capital.

(3) Refusal to obey the government of the society of which one is a member is a very serious matter. Still, most moralists and political philosophers have been of opinion that individuals are fully justified in disobeying the State if the State commands them to do something which they are convinced to be wrong. Social solidarity is not always desirable. There is such a thing as solidarity with evil as well as solidarity with good. A man who finds himself on a pirate ship is morally justified in refusing to co-operate with his shipmates in their nefarious activities. All reformers have been men who refused to co-operate, on some important issue, with the societies of which they were members. That is why so many of them have been persecuted by their contemporaries. The Christian religion takes its name from a persecuted reformer.

Criticisms and answers:

(1) The State provided free schools, libraries, pensions, etc. In return the individual should do what the State demands of him.

Answer: (a) The individual pays for State services in taxation.

(b) The State is not God and its demands are not categorical imperatives. The State was made for man, not man for the State. The State is a convenience, like drains or the telephone; its demand that it should be treated as an all-wise divinity is inadmissible and leads, as the history of tyrannies and dictatorships shows, to every kind of crime and disaster.

(c) If the State may justifiably demand of an individual that he should commit murder for the sake of his country, then it is equally justified in demanding that he should commit lesser crimes. But we can imagine the outcry that would be raising by pious militarists if, for example, in an effort to raise the birth-rate and improve the quality of the race, the State were to conscribe all women and compel them to have sexual intercourse with eugenically selected men.

(2) “The pacifist method of dealing with war is too slow and there will be another war before there are enough pacifists to stop it.”

The pacifist method is certainly slow; but the militarist’s method is far slower. Indeed, the militarist’s method is foredoomed to make no advance whatever towards the goal of peace. War produces more war. Only non-violence can produce non-violence. Pacifism is admittedly slow and hard to practice; but the fact remains that it is the only method of getting universal peace which promises to be in the least effective.

(3) “There is something worse than war, and that is injustice.” But war inevitably commits injustices far greater and more widespread than those it was called upon to redress.

(4) “Pacifism tends to increase the arrogance and power of dictators.”

(a) None of the modern dictators has been faced with large-scale pacifism. Where non-violence has been used on a large scale (see Non-Violence) even violent and ruthless rulers have been nonplussed.

(b) What increases the arrogance of dictators is not so much pacifism as the half-hearted use of their own violent methods. The violence of dictators must be opposed either by violence greater than theirs (with the certainty of prolonging the war habit and the possibility of doing irreparable damage to civilization) or else by complete pacifism (which, however slow and difficult, will ultimately lead to the establishment of peace).

propaganda

On the outbreak of war it is as necessary to inflame public opinion into a state of indignation and hatred of her enemy as it is to supply the fighting forces with munitions. The case against the enemy must be stated with complete bias and a suitable amount of exaggeration. Any arguments in support of the enemy’s case must be suppressed. As early as possible atrocities perpetrated by the enemy must be circulated and the enemy’s cruel treatment of prisoners described in order to prevent desertions. In the official circular issued during the Great War, when an endeavor was made to collect the necessary material, it was written: “Essential not literal truth and correctness are necessary. Inherent probability being respected, the thing imagined may be as serviceable as the thing seen.” Lies, therefore, are circulated by each government to stir up resentment in their people. In a country which has not conscription they have to be more lurid and more frequent than in conscripted nations. Faked photographs are useful and studios for the photography of hideous mutilations can be set up. A good catch-phrase is of special value. In the Great War the Kaiser’s supposed reference to the British expeditionary force as “the contemptible little army” helped recruiting more than any other effort that was made. It was only discovered after the war was over that he never said anything of the kind and was not even at the place where he was supposed to have made this statement. No invention about the enemy published independently by the press is ever checked. But any attempt to plead for peace or to say a good word for the enemy may be ruthlessly punished.

It will thus be seen that there was unlimited use, not only of physical violence, but also of fraud. Lies are as necessary in war as shells or planes. Meanwhile militarists assure us that war is the school of virtue. (Consult Falsehood in Wartime, by Lord Ponsonby.)

Where the intervals of peace are used for the preparation of fresh wars, propaganda also plays an important part. It is a significant fact that it is precisely in those countries where military preparations are carried on most intensively that truth is most carefully distorted and suppressed. In the liberal countries there is no official peace-time censorship, such as exists in the totalitarian states. But this does not mean, unhappily, that there is no suppression or distortion of truth in the press of these countries. Newspapers are now run almost exclusively for profit. The result is that nothing must be printed that may dry up the sources of profit. Anything which might frighten away advertisers is kept out of the papers. Nor must we forget the power of the socially irresponsible rich men who own newspapers. These men dictate policy to their editors according to the whim of the moment of their own pecuniary interests. Private, plutocratic censorship takes the place in liberal countries of the official state censorship of totalitarian countries. Luckily, the whims and the financial interests of the plutocrats are not identical. What one suppresses, another allows to appear. More truth gets through in the liberal than in the totalitarian countries. Still, the system in both is thoroughly vicious. (Consult Hamilton Fyfe’s Press Parade.)

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women in modern war, position of

Between 1914 and 1918 the part played by women in carrying on the war was considerable. In France, for example, towards the end of the war, 1,500,000 women were employed in the war industries alone. In England the number of women employed in industry at large was about three millions. Of these, a considerable proportion worked in munition factories. Most of the rest took place of men who were thus released for military service.

In the last war, women gave their services voluntarily. In the next, they will almost certainly be subject to conscription. In the words of a French military writer, Colonel Émile Mayer, “It is the function of the military authority to exploit its human materials [sic] as best it can, in the interests of national defence, without regard to the age of the individuals.” Again, in time of national crisis, every citizen “is at the disposal of the State, whatever his or her sex.” In any future war there will be, not merely military conscription, but also industrial, intellectual and moral conscription: and the whole population, women, children and the aged, as well as men, will be subjected to this State-imposed slavery. War is no longer an affair conducted by a small body of professionals; it has become totalitarian. Women are as intimately concerned in it as men.