Dennis Prager: Pacifism

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Since the 1960s, pacifist doctrines once associated with isolated individuals and religious fringe groups have become quite popular.
     Although few refer to themselves as pacifist — “antiwar,” “peace activist,” and “nonviolent” are among the preferred self-descriptions — millions of people living in democracies have in fact come to sympathize with a doctrine that would lead to widespread cruelty and the triumph of evil.  If, during the Nazi era, democratic societies had practiced pacifism and nonviolence, democracy and human rights would have disappeared, the Jews of the world would have been annihilated, and far more than the fifty-five million killed in World War II would have been killed.
     Yet despite all this, the pacifist belief that killing, war, and violence are always immoral has spread through the Western world.

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Pacifist Argument 1:  It Is Always Wrong to Kill Another Human Being
     The key word here is “always.”  The moment you do not mean “always,” you are no longer a pacifist, but are, like the rest of us, a proponent of the moral use of violence and, thus, an opponent of pacifism.
     The moment you affirm the morality of killing Hitler during World War II or killing a sniper who is shooting schoolchildren, you are an opponent of pacifism and an advocate of the moral use of violence.
     The question is, therefore, not whether killing is ever moral, but when killing is moral.
     Sometimes the answer is perfectly clear, such as when there is no other way to protect an innocent human life.  Sometimes the answer is less clear; e.g., the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II.  But one thing is entirely clear:  By prohibiting moral killing, pacifism ensures immoral killing, i.e., murder.  If we do not kill the sniper who is shooting at schoolchildren, he will murder them.  If men had not killed Nazis, virtually every Jew in the world would have been gassed.  And if someone had killed Lenin in 1917, or Stalin ten years later, over forty million Russians and other Soviet citizens would not have been murdered.
     There is, in sum, moral killing and immoral killing.  The latter is known as murder, which is why we have two words for the taking of human life.

Pacifist Argument 2:  “Thou Shalt Not Kill”
     Now we can understand why the above is not what the Ten Commandments command.  It is an erroneous translation; the sixth commandment reads, “Thou shall not murder.”  Like English, Hebrew distinguishes between killing and murder.  According to the Bible, killing can sometimes be justifiable, even virtuous, whereas murder, the deliberate killing of an innocent person, is deemed the most evil of acts.
     It is sad when clergy misquote the Ten Commandments, but it is much worse than sad when they denounce all violence equally in the name of religion.  The first is excusable when the reason is ignorance of Hebrew, but the second is inexcusable.  All decent people long for Isaiah’s vision of the time when “nation shall not lift up sword against nation” (2:4), but the way to hasten Isaiah’s messianic vision is to fight evil, not to allow it to proliferate.
     Moses, the greatest human in the Bible, killed a slave master who was beating a slave (Exodus 2:12).  This biblical hero deliberately killed a man, an act that God, who thereafter chose Moses as his prophet, apparently deemed virtuous.

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Pacifist Argument 5:  You Can’t Fight Violence With Violence
     The essence of this argument is that when you use violence to fight evil, you are fighting evil with evil, and you become the moral equivalent of the evil you are fighting.  This pacifist contention that fighting violence with violence is always wrong is an example of the pernicious doctrine of moral equivalence — all violence is morally equivalent; the person who kills a murderer is morally equated with the murderer.
     The idea that violence can sometimes be used to achieve good has become foreign to the mind blunted by the pacifist notion that it is always wrong.
     But, of course, the most obvious rejoinder to the argument that you can’t fight violence with violence is:  With what then will you fight criminal violence?

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     Killing must always be the last resort.  Every nonviolent attempt to stop evil must be made first.  But “last resort” means just that:  When all other attempts fail, moral violence must be used to fight immoral violence.

Dennis Prager
Chapter 33, “The Immorality of Pacifist Thinking”
Think a Second Time