Much of the world has united in opposition to the death and destruction that Russian President Vladimir Putin began raining down on the people of Ukraine in late February. Even in Russia itself, tens of thousands of protesters in dozens of cities have taken to the streets, facing brutal repression. There are calls from all over to end the aggression.
There are also calls for ammunition, weapons, military hardware, and tactical support to help the people of Ukraine kill the enemy more effectively. Military escalation will lead inevitably to the slaughter of more innocents, as all wars do. We need voices calling for de-escalating this conflict, using nonviolent means to bring the war to an end.
Erwin Knoll
Our magazine’s founder, Wisconsin Senator Robert M. “Fighting Bob” La Follette, was one of just six U.S. Senators opposing the United States’ entry into World War I, for which he was vilified in the press, branded by many as a traitor, burned in effigy, and threatened with expulsion from the U.S. Senate. Yet he remained clear-eyed in his opposition, declaring in an April 4, 1917, speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate: “[L]et us throw pretense to the winds, let us be honest, let us admit that this is a ruthless war against not only Germany’s Army and her Navy but against her civilian population as well . . . .”
Pacifists are often challenged with questions like “What about Hitler?” The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave a very clear response to this when speaking to the American Jewish Committee in a New York hotel on May 20, 1965. “If Protestants and Catholics had engaged in nonviolent direct action,” he said, “and had made the oppression of the Jews their very own oppression and had come into the streets beside the Jew[s] to scrub the sidewalks, and had Gentiles worn the stigmatizing yellow arm bands by the millions, a unique form of mass resistance to the Nazi regime might have developed.”
King was very clear: nonviolent direct action, when seriously and thoughtfully applied, can be used to confront all forms of violence. Guns and bombs are not the only tools we have to oppose evil and violence in our world.
In 1991, after the United States launched a war against Iraq in response to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait, Erwin Knoll, then-editor of The Progressive and himself a survivor of Adolph Hitler’s war of conquest in Europe, wrote in the magazine, “The casualties of war are hardly ever the patriarchs and oligarchs and despots who are supposedly its targets. Just wars claim the just—not the unjust—as their victims.”
Knoll went on to address the question of whether it was necessary to stop Hitler. His reply: “Sure it was; it was necessary, in fact, not to let him get started. But of all the ways to stop Hitler or to keep him from getting started, war was the worst—the way that inflicted the most pain, the most suffering, the most damage on everyone—especially on Hitler’s victims.”
When the United States responded to the tragic terror attacks of 9/11 by launching a war of revenge on Afghanistan, historian and peace activist Howard Zinn wrote in The Progressive, “We need new ways of thinking . . . . We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.”
The war in Ukraine is as senseless as any of the wars that came before it. The death and destruction being wrought by Russia will not be redeemed by more escalation. As Pope Francis has said, “Every war leaves our world worse than it was before. War is a failure of politics and of humanity, a shameful capitulation, a stinging defeat before the forces of evil.”
There is no such thing as a just war, and there never will be.