Dear Chuck:
To me, a most telling example of a very wise and effective person changing their understanding of what pacifism means to them is Bayard Rustin.
ED NOTE: From a review by Alan Brinkley in the New York Times, March 2, 1997:
Bayard Rustin is probably best remembered today for his close association with Martin Luther King Jr. and for his part in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. But his role in the civil rights movement was only one of the many he played in his long and varied career. He was a major figure in the American pacifist movement and both a theorist and practitioner of nonviolence.
[Born a Quaker in 1912] He remained active in peace causes until his death [in 1987]. He was, at various times, a Communist, an anti-Communist Socialist and a well-connected activist within the Democratic Party. He was a champion of the American labor movement and a well-traveled advocate of human rights throughout the world. He was a talented musician who once considered a career as a professional singer and entertained audiences with his powerful tenor voice throughout his life. He was an avid collector of art and antiques. He was a self-educated scholar of philosophy and political theory. He was a black American. And he was a gay man.
Rustin juggled these multiple roles and multiple identities with remarkable agility and, on the surface at least, seldom exhibited any serious anxiety about the strains they must often have created for him. . . .
As a Quaker, Rustin easily won conscientious objector status [in World War II]. But true to the radical pacifism of Muste and his organization, he refused to report to the Civilian Public Service camp to which he was then assigned, because, he said, ''I cannot voluntarily submit to an order stemming from the Selective Service Act.'' He spent nearly two and a half years in Federal prison as a result, the first of many imprisonments he experienced -- all but one of them for acts of conscience. . . .
Rustin worked closely with King and the movement for nearly a decade. . .But his relationship with King was never an easy one. In part, it was because his radical past and very likely, although no one ever said so, his homosexuality . . . .
But Rustin's problems with King were also a result of Rustin's own relative conservatism in areas in which King was becoming more radical. He criticized King for denouncing the Vietnam War; Rustin opposed it too, but like many others he thought King was compromising his leadership of the civil rights struggle by linking the issues. . . . And he began to argue as early as 1967 that the ''movement'' phase of the civil rights struggle had lost its usefulness, that it was time for blacks to turn to politics (and to form coalitions with other progressive forces, most notably labor) to work for the economic reforms that should now be their most important goal.
In the late 60's . . . he was becoming increasingly at odds with his former colleagues in the movement. He was a strong critic of black nationalism and black power, a fervent believer in making political alliances with powerful groups dominated by whites, a defender of the Democratic Party and the labor movement . . . .
He was a man of ideas and a man of action, of ''pragmatic idealism,'' as
Vernon Jordan said in eulogy. And in an age of acrimony and division, he helped keep alive
the fading vision of a broad, consensual coalition of the forces of change.
Tom Rodd continues:
I don't have time to discuss his career in any detail, but in essence, according to his biographer (Jervis Anderson, Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen: A Biography. New York, HarperCollins, 1998), he came to feel that most people will value freedom, safety, and security most highly, and a majority would never support a policy that rejected violence in the face of threats to these values and interests.
Therefore, he felt that true pacifism would always be limited to a position that some people can take "on their own," but would have little practical value as a political position, because it would never be adopted by a majority.
I believe that Rustin thought that building democratic structures that were short of conventional nation-state militarism, but did include the possibility, when necessary, of organized violence -- "police" power, some would call it -- structures that promoted freedom and security so that people would not feel they needed to use military power -- was what people who were "personally" pacifists should be up to.
My father and mother, who as young people both came out of WWII, and like many, saw promoting world government as a step in this direction. Neither of them were "pacifists," but their generation saw the horrors of war.
Personally, as a Quaker, social activist, and lawyer (and two-time imprisoned Vietnam draft resister), I have come to "support" (or not object to, it comes to much the same thing) the use of legitimate, armed police power on a domestic and international basis; and to believe that concepts like national defense through nonviolent resistance, which a number of Gandhian thinkers whose work I admire have discussed at length, are interesting intellectually but irrelevant politically.
What is the line between legitimate armed "police" power, and traditional nation-state military power, is the tricky part, of course. I suppose each person using this Niebuhrian (?) approach must define that for themselves.
Finally, I believe that the recent "plane bombings" may be looked at in hindsight as a very noteworthy, even "hinge" moment in the evolution of a worldwide, democratic system of global security and governance, which I am sure will proceed inevitably but fitfully (and yes, bloodily) -- if we don't first kill off the species.
Thanks for raising these important issues. Feel free to use these comments.
Tom Rodd
Moatsville, WV
This page posted by Chuck Fager, Tenth Month (October) 2001
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