Right-wing and left-wing pro-Russian parties undermine the West’s willingness to defend themselves by posing as consistent friends of peace. In doing so, they make use of the nimbus of pacifism as a fundamentally honorable attitude.
But in fact, pacifism has already in the 20th century played a predominantly devastating role. Because a consistent pacifist attitude could only be maintained by obstructing the question of how to defend oneself unarmed against powers that consider war, submission and extermination of other peoples as their actual purpose of existence, as is the case with Putin’s Russia today.
From this realization, pacifists like Albert Einstein moved away from their position when they were confronted with the seizure of power by absolute evil. “Until 1933,” Einstein explained, “I campaigned for the refusal of military service. But when fascism arose, I realized that this position could not be maintained if the power of the world was not to fall into the hands of the worst enemies of mankind.“
On the other hand, those who did not want to compromise on their own pacifist maxims even in the face of this ultimate threat, had no choice but to systematically gloss over the totalitarian danger. In their zeal to downplay the threat of totalitarianism, many pacifists got more and more deeply entangled in his propaganda lies, often even to identify themselves completely with him.
A famous example of this is the automobile pioneer Henry Ford, who, as a fundamental opponent of the war, became a radical anti-Semite and early supporter of Hitler and the NSDAP. In 1915, Ford set off with a “peace ship” for Europe, where he wanted to offer himself as a mediator between the warring parties of the First World War. After its end, Ford turned out to be a fanatical anti-Semite, who in his book “The International Jew” blamed Judaism for all the evils of the world. In the 1930s, the industrial tycoon became part of the isolationist current that agitated under the slogan “America First” against the entry of the war of the USA on the side of European democracies.
The idea that there could be an underlying connection between pacifism and anti-Semitism seems strange at first glance. But in a perverse way, National Socialism also offered a latent “pacifist” message. Hitler did not tire of blaming Judaism for the outbreak of the First World War and accusing it of wanting to plunge the peoples into a great war again. In doing so, he suggested that once the Jews were eliminated, “the peoples” would be able to live together in peaceful harmony. This does not seem to have missed its effect on some pacifists.
Thus, Pierre Laval, head of the Vichy government under Marshal Pétain and a particularly fanatical Nazi collaborator, had begun his political career as a representative of the pacifist wing of the French Socialist Party. A number of other French stooges of the 1940 Nazi occupation originally came from the pacifist left – like Marcel Déat, who wrote an editorial in 1939 published under the headline “Why die for Danzig?”. This slogan soon became a battle cry of the opponents of a French mobilization against Hitler’s Germany. Déat created a left-right-knit party entirely tailored to his person, which called for unconditional cooperation with the Nazi occupiers. Followers of Déat are even said to have participated as volunteers in the hunt for French Jews, who were rounded up for deportation to the extermination camps.
But the mendacious “pacifism” of today’s European far-right parties such as the AfD also has precursors – for example in Jacques Doriot, the leader of the far-right PPF, whose radical nationalism did not prevent her in the 1930s from propagating the disarmament of France out of admiration for the German dictator.
Despite this susceptibility to totalitarian thinking, the pacifist idea, especially in Germany, still enjoys an unbroken high esteem. But this is not only due to the commendable resolution never to fall back into the militarism of the German past. After 1945, pacifism also served in Germany as a means of relieving one’s own co-responsibility and co-responsibility in the Nazi barbarism.
An example of this is the Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller, who rose to become an iconic figure of the “peace movement” in the 1950s and 1960s. Although he was a fundamental supporter of National Socialism, Niemöller ended up in the concentration camp in 1938 because of his deviating theological positions as a “personal prisoner” of Hitler. Even then, however, he did not completely break with the Nazi ideology – and his own anti-Semitism.
From his imprisonment at the outbreak of war in 1939, Niemöller made a request to Hitler to serve as a submarine commander, as he did in the First World War – which, however, was refused. After the war, Niemöller presented himself as a radical pacifist, who spoke out vehemently against the rearmament of the Federal Republic and in particular against nuclear armament. By doing so, he showed no fear of contact with communist totalitarianism. In 1966, he even received the Lenin Peace Prize of the USSR.
Being against “the war” in itself offered national conservatives like Niemöller, who were discredited by their proximity to the Nazi system, the opportunity to distract from the singular criminal character of the German war of extermination and to rise pseudomorally above the Western Allies – especially over the USA, which was often presented as particularly warmongering. In this variant, too, it becomes clear that an anti-democratic affect is often hidden behind the attitude of uncompromising peacefulness.
The article first appeared in German here and in Ukrainian here.
