Step One

Today seems as good a day as any to answer the big pacifist Hitler question. If you’re not a pacifist, you may not have been asked this question, but every pacifist knows what we’re talking about: upon learning a person’s pacifistic inclinations, people ask, “But what about Hitler?” What they mean by this is, sure, you don’t want to go to war generally, but don’t you have to, sometimes? Didn’t we all have to go to war to prevent the great evil of Hitler and fascism from remaining in the world?

There are several good pacifist responses to this question.

One World War II conscientious objector said, when asked why he wouldn’t go to war to defeat Hitler’s evil, “If you give me a shot at him, I’ll take it.” But the objector said he did not care to kill other soldiers, who were just pawns of their government.

This argument is flawed, though; looking to the actions of Germans during World War II, we see many common soldiers and citizens participating in war crimes and outright genocide. Hitler did not pull all the levers himself. Therefore, wouldn’t it be morally acceptable to go to war against these people, to stop them from doing this great evil? If it’s all right to shoot Hitler to stop the killing, it’s all right to shoot the police battalion before they can massacre innocent townspeople, too.

A slightly better pacifist argument is to dodge the question by saying, well, it’s not fair to ask us for a solution to Hitler beyond going to war. Hitler was caused by war. His ideology was born out of the humiliation of his country’s military defeat in World War I, and the less-than-conciliatory approach the Allies took in imposing terms on Germany that crippled it economically and wounded its national pride. To have done all that, and then, when Hitler comes to power, to turn to the pacifist and say, “Well? What else can we do?” is a bit like asking your passenger for guidance after you’ve already driven the car off the cliff.

This is closer to the truth, but it’s also nothing more than being able to say, “I told you so.” Surely, we can do better than that.

The answer to the question of how you deal with one murderous dictator is, oddly enough, another murderous dictator. That is, the answer to Hitler is Stalin. We fought that war, which put an end to the systematic killing of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and political dissidents. In that war, our ally was Josef Stalin, who, until he died in 1953, continued his policies of systematically killing…well, anyone he cared to.

But, if they were both evil, wasn’t Stalinism at least a little bit less evil than Nazism? Isn’t that the necessary realist triage of diplomacy and war, taking the lesser of two evils?

We at the Blasphemy Blog consider it a waste of time to debate whether Stalin or Hitler was worse, because such a comparison invites questions no one is capable of answering. Which would you rather be, a Jew in Nazi Germany, or a kulak living under Stalin? Would you rather face the “final solution” or “liquidation as a class?” At some point, evil reaches a critical mass beyond which any added evil makes no difference. We would argue that Stalin and Hitler were both way, way over that line.

All of this, anyway, is beside the point. We defeated Hitler, after he’d already killed millions. Defeating Hitler cost the lives of millions. Then, we didn’t war directly against the Soviet Union, because the specter of nuclear weapons made us hesitate in order to save the lives of millions. So, we didn’t defeat Stalin, and he went on to kill millions.

So there doesn’t seem to be an easy way that the deaths of millions of people in the twentieth century could have been prevented. It seems like, no matter how we tried to do it, millions of people ended up dying. Faced with this dilemma, the pacifist simply decides not to go for a ride in the car along the side of a cliff. The pacifist decides not to kill anyone, ever, just to be on the safe side.

The pacifist offers only a personal solution to the problem of war’s uncertain effects. This is why pacifism is so unsatisfying. The pacifist does not try to save the world; the pacifist tries not to hurt the world. The righteous warrior asks, How can I eliminate the evil of Stalin? and resolves to kill Stalin. The pacifist asks, How can I eliminate the evil of Stalin? and resolves not to be like Stalin.

For the pacifist, that step, not being like Hitler or Stalin, is step one. It is a difficult step. But we want to take it before we take step two, because we know that Stalin and Hitler missed a few steps along the way, and we don’t want to follow their path even a little bit. A pacifist, a wise man once told the Blasphemy Blog, is not a person who is incapable of violence. A pacifist is someone who knows exactly how much violence he or she is capable of.