Nonviolence (8 page)

Around 1460, about his seventieth year, ChelCicky died. But his teachings continued to find adherents. Calling themselves the Unity of Brethren, twenty years after ChelCicky's death they had ten thousand members among the Czechs. Forty years later a similar pacifist movement, the Anabaptists, rose up in German-speaking Switzerland. Such movements became part of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther insisted on nonviolence in personal relations, though he accepted warfare. The Anabaptists of Zurich broke with the Reformation in 1525, when Reformation leader Ul-rich Zwingli would not go as far as they wanted on such issues as a complete ban on violence.

Between 1525 and 1800 more than two hundred decrees were issued by various European governments denouncing the Anabaptists. These denunciations were often based on the Anabaptist position that conscious adult believers should be baptized and not unknowing infants. But they were also denounced for their refusal to bear arms. Like the early Christians, their refusal extended to any participation in the state. They also refused to swear oaths, including oaths of allegiance, a stand that can be traced at least as far back as the Cathars. In the Middle Ages oaths had been essential to the warrior code, and rejecting them was rejecting war. Today oaths seem less important, and most contemporaries never swear an oath. But Americans are still required as young children to pledge allegiance to the flag, one of the first steps in conditioning young Americans for war. This assertion can be easily tested: denounce the saying of the pledge of allegiance and see if the people who are outraged are not the same people who promote war.

The Anabaptists, seen as a threat to the state, were driven out of one town after another, exiled, and sometimes executed. Despite this, or perhaps as a result of their repeated exile, the movement
spread as far west as Alsace, throughout Germany, Austria, and the Tirol. They were particularly disliked in Hapsburg lands, as they refused to fight the Turks. One Anabaptist leader, Michael Sattler, argued at his 1527 trial that the Turks were non-Christians and knew nothing of Christ's teachings, while the Christians who would go to war against them were “Turks after the spirit,” pagans who had rejected Christ's teachings. Sattler said he would rather battle them than the Turks. He was executed. Of all the dangerous Anabaptist heresies, none was more threatening to the state than this refusal to fight Turks.

But the movement continued to spread. By the seventeenth century it had traveled north to Holland and east to Poland. In 1658 the Polish Catholic Church forced Anabaptists to either convert to Catholicism or leave. Many left—for Transylvania, Germany, and Holland.

In 1568 Holland began its long war of independence against Spain. Suddenly groups appeared—the Mennonites, the Waterlanders—refusing military service and stating that they would not fight the Spanish. The Mennonites are so called because they followed Menno Simons, a sixteenth-century Dutch Catholic priest who had left the Church to work with the Anabaptist movement. In 1572 the Mennonites went to the prince, William of Orange, challenging the notion always hurled at pacifists, that they were unpatriotic. They told William that they wanted to find a non-violent way to support his cause. The Mennonites offered to raise money for the financially strapped king and with dazzling speed raised a sizable sum from their members. It became a tradition in Holland to tax Mennonites in time of war in exchange for exemption from military service. In the seventeenth century they agreed to serve in noncombatant roles. When Louis XIV of France invaded Holland in 1672, Mennonites volunteered as firemen in besieged cities. Such alternative efforts make pacifists better accepted. But the troubling issue of whether offering services is helping the war would remain for centuries.

A good lesson for the military is that the longer wars last, the less popular they become. So it is not surprising that a war known as the Thirty Years War would be deeply unpopular. Of course no one planned for the war to last that long, and the name came later. Wars usually start well for the war promoters. The Urban II speech is made; the enemy is declared despicable; God's stand, firmly behind the cause, is declared; and the killing is nothing short of the honorable and patriotic thing to do. In the case of the Thirty Years War no one could find as tidy a justification as “driving out the infidel,” but the cause was outlined with the prerequisite simplicity nevertheless. The war was basically about the dismantling of the Holy Roman Empire, which, as every schoolchild learns, was never holy, was German, not Roman, and was never exactly an empire.

Today it is difficult to explain what those two generations of combat were about—neither the first nor last war to lose meaning in hindsight—yet European monarchs were able to raise huge armies nevertheless to slaughter each other from 1618 to 1648, for the cause, or causes. It was as though World War I had continued into World War II without a break in the fighting.

Most of the fighting took place in Germany, decimating the German population, destroying German agriculture and trade, and giving German peasantry a jaundiced view of war for the next two centuries, during which time German pacifist and antiwar movements flourished. Numerous groups, such as the Spiritualists, mystics who believed inspiration from the Holy Ghost was more important than Scripture, opposed war. The year the war ended, 1648, a mystic named Paul Felgenhauer wrote
Perspective of War,
a book asserting that the recent calamity in Germany was the beginning of the end of the world. He argued that a complete rejection of warfare was the only reasonable stance. Other books rejecting warfare, even defensive war, were written after the war by other mystics, such as Christian Hohburg of Hamburg and Annecken Hoogwand, who declared war a sin. Pietism, a sect that challenged the Lutheran establishment much the way earlier sects had challenged Catholicism, emerged with a strong antiwar message. From this movement came the German Baptist Brethren, popularly
known as the Dunkers, who embraced a style of pacifism similar to that of the Mennonites.

Enduring a civil war followed by a revolution, seventeenth-century England also experienced enough warfare to stimulate antiwar movements. In this setting, Quakerism, a mystic religion that was neither Catholic not Protestant, rejected both sides in the English upheaval. To a Quaker, Oliver Cromwell, who led the Puritans to power through his military prowess, was the Constantine of Puritanism. By establishing the religion he had destroyed its principles.

The Quakers were so named, mockingly, after the physical habits of its founder, George Fox, when in a state of spiritual possession. Though initially persecuted, especially by local government, the Quakers were largely protected by Cromwell as one of theirs, once the Puritans came to power. But Quakers provoked the political establishment by refusing the taking of oaths and the tipping of a hat as a sign of respect. Only gradually did they become pacifists, and once they adopted an uncompromising antiwar stance, their persecution, including prison, public beatings, and whippings, became widespread. In the 1670s their meeting houses were forcibly closed, even physically dismantled.

Spin-offs of Puritanism also rejected violence, such as the Diggers, a short-lived movement that tried to establish an egalitarian commune in rural Surrey in 1649. They were destroyed by a violent mob, but were much talked about and imitated by Yippies and other 1960s movements in the United States. Gerrard Winstanley, the founder of the Diggers, had called war “a plague” and wrote, “We abhor fighting for freedom.” This seems a strange paradox at first until one reflects on how often in history war is justified as a fight for freedom and how rarely that is the true goal.

War burdens the working class, and that was traditionally the source of antiwar sentiments. Quaker founder George Fox was a shoemaker. But William Penn, a convert to Quakerism in 1667, at the age of twenty-three, was the son of a British admiral and an aristocrat with a personal acquaintanceship with King James II. Even after his conversion, he was reluctant at first to drop the aristocratic
fashion of wearing a sword. Penn wrote of the persuasive power of love and the unchristian, warlike nature of Christians, whom he termed—in the ultimate seventeenth-century European insult—to be worse than the Turks. It was Penn who offered the simplest formula for ending war, that it starts with an individual refusing to fight. According to Penn, “Somebody must begin it.”

The governments of the earth have built up a structure that exists only by the power of money. The head of the land—the Queen—is honored in proportion to the pomps and vanities of her immediate attendants. Her governors all hold out their hands for their wages, without which their patriotism would shrivel up.

—TE WHITI, Maori chief, 1879

A
not insignificant piece of misinformation passed on to American schoolchildren is that Pennsylvania was named after the Quaker leader, William Penn. Penn was the founder of the colony after obtaining a charter from King Charles II of England for a “holy experiment.” But Charles named the colony not for this questionable Quaker pacifist but for his father, the great British admiral Sir William Penn, who had served in the First and Second Dutch Wars and captured the island of Jamaica from the Spanish. This was the kind of man kings named holdings after—not his son, who while the admiral was fighting for England was expelled from Oxford for unorthodox religious beliefs and had been getting into trouble ever since.

Quakers went to other colonies as well. The first recorded case of an American conscientious objector was Richard Keene, a Quaker convert who refused training in the Maryland militia and was fined and angrily threatened with a drawn saber by his commanding officer. The first two Quakers known to arrive in America— although a missionary also arrived in Maryland around the same time and two years earlier a Long Island resident had converted during a visit to England—were two women missionaries who landed in Boston in 1656. Within two months they were expelled. Seven more arrived and Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies both began passing increasingly brutal anti-Quaker ordinances—from heavy fines to men and women being stripped to the waist and beaten, to mutilations of ears and tongues. By 1658, four Quakers had been executed.

But Pennsylvania was different. Penn's holy experiment attracted to America not only Quakers but Mennonites, Dunkers, and other pacifists and idealists. Penn had intended Pennsylvania to be a model for the world, a pacifist state, what Penn called “a precedent.” The early years of the colony were marked by an unusually open relationship with the Indians and a firm stance against war.

Pennsylvania militias were volunteer forces. The colony did not accept British conscription in local militias as the other colonies did. Although in Rhode Island Quakers were automatically exempt from military service, most other colonies insisted that conscientious objectors pay a fine or hire someone to serve as a replacement, neither of which was an acceptable alternative to Quakers. In time of war this led to persecution, often imprisonment. Even before the French and Indian War, an American extension of the nearly global Seven Years War, there was almost constant warring with Indians and between European powers in North America and the Caribbean, including King William's War (1689–97), Queen Anne's War (1702–13), and King George's War (1744). To live in a European colony was to constantly be called upon to fight Europe's wars.

During all these conflicts there were small numbers of Americans, not all of them religious, who refused to fight. In 1675 a few men refused to participate in preparations to defend against an Indian assault on Boston. In the early eighteenth century the Massachusetts colony found it necessary to pass a law establishing prison sentences for those who refused to bear arms. Indian attacks were said by some to be God's punishment for the colony allowing the presence of Quakers.

Historians commonly suggest that the acts of political leaders are the result of the slow dissemination of—and society's osmotic absorption of—the ideas of intellectuals. While it is true that political leaders absorb ideas from the academy, they also requisition ideas, embracing those thinkers who provide them with the intellectual underpinnings for what they want to do. In seventeenth-century Europe, as policies of warfare, colonialism, and slavery were expanded, a great deal of thought went into rationalizing these acts. No nation of the period was as successful at providing intellectual justifications for these policies as England. Richard Tuck, a professor of government at Harvard University, has stated that the reason England was the most successful European colonizer is that it had the best intellectual underpinnings for this role.

Alberico Gentili, an Italian who in the late sixteenth century became an Oxford professor of civil law, expanded the concept of defensive warfare and established the principle, recently touted by the George W. Bush presidency to justify invading Iraq, of the preemptive strike. “No one ought to wait to be struck unless he is a fool,” Gentili wrote. The argument was not new. The Romans justified attacking Carthage by claiming that Carthage would at some point in the future attack them. But given the state of intra-European relations in Gentili's time, there was not a moment in the next few centuries when some European power could not reasonably fear the military of another and unleash a preemptive strike, which is why that era saw scarcely a moment without warfare. “For certainly,” in Gentili's words, “as long as men are men, the sons of Prometheus and not Epimetheus, and as long as reason is reason, a just fear will be a just cause of a preventative war.”