Just Peace?
Michael Bartlet reflects that in matters of conscience ‘context is all’
The world’s last known combat veteran of the first world war died last year. He was aged 110. Claude Choules was born in Worcestershire, in March 1901, and lied about his age to join the Royal Navy at fifteen. He was a sailor on HMS Revenge. He witnessed the scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow in 1918 and saw the humiliation of Germany that planted the seeds of the rise of Nazism and that culminated in the second world war. In his nineties he refused to march in the annual Australian commemoration parades. He came to identify himself as a pacifist. As a child he will have met men and women who were alive in the early nineteenth century, at the time of the American civil war, and in extreme old age held great grandchildren in his arms that may live into the twenty-second.
There is a temptation to make his story a morality play of twentieth century history, in which the military chauvinism of youth matures into a commitment to nonviolent means. There is, also, a danger in making any one life a representative ‘conscience’ of the twentieth century. The essence of conscience is not the rigid application of rules but the capacity to make individual judgments in particular circumstances.
Justice and peace
Early Quakers knew the reality of violence. Many had born arms in a bloody civil war. George Fox was not, initially, a pacifist and he refused a parliamentary commission because of his opposition to the taking of oaths. His spiritual diary was edited in the context of the political settlement of the Restoration. In 1658, he urged the lord protector to conduct a crusade against Popery in Europe. The Peace Principle, as recorded in the declaration to Charles II of 1660, was initially a pragmatic acceptance of defeat. Seventeenth century Quakers were as concerned with justice as with peace. The thinking of George Fox, Gerrard Winstanley and the early Quaker radicals offered a vision of a just society that anticipates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by three hundred years.
There is often a tension between justice and peace. A commitment to human rights and the peace testimony may appear to offer two absolutes, admitting of no compromise. What happens when the irresistible, humanitarian imperative of a responsibility to protect meets the immovable principle of pacifism?
International humanitarian intervention crystallises this dilemma. Is it better for the international community to intervene militarily and risk blood on its collective conscience or to stand idly by and witness the slaughter of innocents? Does a refusal to use arms, in the last analysis, imply identifying with the aggressor? Inevitably, we each see these issues through the prism of our personal experience.
Personal experience
Both my parents enlisted in the second world war. My mother worked at Bletchley Park. My father, as a young man, saw himself as pacifist. But in the second world war he joined up as a medical officer to oppose fascism. He did not join up to fight. He saw enlistment as his humanitarian duty. He survived the massacre at the Alexandra hospital in Singapore. After the surrender to the Imperial Japanese Army he became a prisoner of war and worked on the Burma railway. My personal experience, as with everyone, colours my religious and political judgments. Are we naïve to believe that peaceful means provide an adequate response to every political eventuality – especially once the killing has started? Are all uses of armed force morally equivalent? What does the Peace Testimony mean for us today?
The Quaker identity
After the war, Quakers supported the 1951 Genocide Convention. The Convention provides: ‘that genocide […] is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and punish.’ There is no right without a remedy. The Convention requires a means of enforcement. The legal sands here are shifting. A court in the Netherlands has held the Dutch state responsible for the deaths of three Muslims during the Srebrenica massacre. Dutch forces serving with the UN failed to protect them. Is the Srebrenica massacre, the UN’s failure to protect Muslim men and boys, as morally shocking as any use of military force in Kosovo? These are neuralgic issues touching on our Quaker identity. Are they to remain taboo? How can we find ways of discussing them with integrity?
The shared experience of worship is at the heart of our identity. We are not a credal community. In listening to the spirit and to our friends in Quaker worship we have the potential to go beyond our limited egos. Is there perhaps a danger in making our testimonies a substitute for creeds? Do we make a mistake in confusing the Peace Testimony as a symbol of the divinity of every individual with the political proposition that nonviolent means are always the most ethical ways of responding to organised violence?
Beyond pacifism?
On a political level, I admire most those Friends who demonstrate a pragmatic commitment to building a just and peaceful society. Grigor McClelland, who served in the Friends Ambulance Unit in Germany, was one of the people who drew me to Quakers. I deeply respect the principles that drew many Quakers to refuse to bear arms in the second world war. But I am no less inspired by the actions of the Lutheran theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who moved beyond the pacifism of his early writing to take part in the plot to assassinate Hitler and was martyred at Flossenbürg in the final months of the war. In matters of conscience context is all.
In the poem ‘Strange Meeting’ Wilfred Owen laments, in embracing a German soldier, ‘I am the enemy you killed my friend’. For Owen it is the love of his friends that is the foundation of his personal philosophy. His poetic intelligence probes raw feelings to unfold the painful paradox of war. Owen was trapped in a German dug out. Recovering from shell shock, in Craiglockhart hospital, he explored his dreams in psychotherapy. Owen expanded the circle of empathy to envelop even his enemies. But he did not become a pacifist and returned to the front. As a compassionate and humanitarian man, caught in the ‘pity of war’, his spiritual insights differed from those equally brave men who worked with the Friends Ambulance Unit.
Once the killing starts
I am passionately committed to both justice and peace. The prevention of violent conflict requires redress to the seeds of injustice at its roots. The scars of war born by my father were part of the family experience that drew me to the Society of Friends. Democratic politics and skilled mediation have the potential to transform intractable conflicts. The Good Friday agreement illustrates how a suspension of violence can be consolidated into a resilient peace.
What do we do once the killing starts? How do we choose between supporting international intervention and letting conflict ‘burn itself out’ with all the human misery that implies? In reflecting on intervention today, in areas where British Quakers have neither personal experience nor particular historical knowledge, would we do well to remain silent politically? Maybe we need the humility to distinguish between our spiritual insights, intuitions founded in personal experience, and the presentation of them, as if they were political axioms for all time.
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