The Scientist as Rebel (16 page)

A hundred years have now passed since Tolstoy’s conversion, and the power of nationalism over men’s minds is as strong as ever. There was perhaps a chance, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, that the working people of Europe would unite in a common determination not to be used as cannon fodder in their masters’ quarrels. This was the dream which Tolstoy dreamed, and it was shared by many of the leaders of workers’ organizations in various European countries during the years before 1914 when these organizations were growing rapidly in membership and power. The dream was an international brotherhood of workers united in loyalty to socialist and pacifist principles. The dream was an international general strike that would become effective on the day of declaration of war and would leave the generals of the belligerent armies without soldiers to command. Among the leaders who believed in international brotherhood as a practical political program for the workers of the world, Jean Jaurès of France was outstanding. Jaurès was an experienced politician, representing the French Socialist Party in the Chamber of Deputies, and reelected repeatedly by his constituency of miners. He was a patriotic Frenchman and never advocated unilateral disarmament or unconditional pacifism. He knew personally the Socialist leaders in Germany and Austria and understood the ambiguities of
their position. But he believed with passionate conviction in the possibility that an international general strike against war could be successful. This dream collapsed on July 31, 1914, when the German, Austrian, and Russian armies were already mobilizing for war, the workers in each country had forgotten their international brotherhood and were marching obediently to the frontiers to defend their respective fatherlands, and Jaurès, sitting disconsolate at his supper in a restaurant in Paris, was shot dead by a fanatical French patriot.

Tolstoy’s radical pacifism never became a serious political force in Europe, and least of all in Russia, either before or after the revolution. The only effective action of workers against war occurred in 1917, when Lenin encouraged the soldiers of Alexander Kerensky’s government to desert from the front lines where they were fighting the Germans. But this desertion was not the fulfillment of Jaurès’s dream of an international strike against war; it was merely an opening move in the new war for which Lenin was preparing. As soon as Lenin had seized power, he organized a new army and used it to defend his territory against the remnants of the old army in the civil war of 1918–1921. Neither the Tsar before the revolution nor Lenin afterward hesitated to spill blood; neither had difficulty in finding an ample supply of young Russians willing to kill or to die for the defense of Russia against her enemies. The seeds of Tolstoy’s gospel of nonviolence fell mostly upon stony soil as they were carried all over the world, and nowhere was the soil stonier than in his native Russia.

The great blossoming of nonviolence as a mass political movement was the work of Gandhi in India. For thirty years he led the fight for Indian independence and held his followers to a Tolstoyan code of behavior. He proved that
satyagraha
, soul-force, can be an effective substitute for bombs and bullets in the liberation of a people.
Satyagraha
, a word and a concept invented by Gandhi, means much more than nonviolence.
Satyagraha
is not merely passive resistance or abstention from violent actions.
Satyagraha
is the active use of moral
pressure as a weapon for the achievement of social and political goals. Gandhi used
satyagraha
impartially to castigate the British governors of India and his own followers, whenever they strayed from the path of nonviolence. With his Hindu background and his London lawyer’s training, he understood the psychology of Indian peasants and of imperial government officials, and succeeded in bending them both to his will. The chief tools of
satyagraha
were civil disobedience, the peaceful but ostentatious breaking of laws imposed by the alien authorities, and the fast unto death, a personal hunger strike in which Gandhi repeatedly wagered his life in order to compel friends and enemies alike to attend to his demands. The tools worked. There were many setbacks and occasional lapses into violence, but the campaign of
satyagraha
succeeded in winning independence for India without any war between the native population and the occupying power. British administrators found Gandhi absurd and exasperating, but they could neither shoot him nor keep him permanently in prison. When he fasted unto death they dared not let him die, knowing that no one who might take his place would be able so well to control the violent temper of his followers.
Satyagraha
was an effective weapon in Gandhi’s hands because he was, unlike Tolstoy, an astute politician. For thirty years Gandhi was, in effect, collaborating with the British authorities in keeping India peaceful, while at the same time defying them publicly so that he never appeared to his followers as a British stooge. Successful use of
satyagraha
requires, besides courage and moral grandeur, a talent for practical politics, an understanding of the weak points of the enemy, a sense of humor, and a little luck. Gandhi possessed all these gifts and used them to the full.

Gandhi’s luck ran out at the end of his life, when the campaign against British rule was won and he was trying to bring India to independence as a united country. He then had to deal with quarrels between Hindu and Muslim, deeper and more bitter than the power
struggle between European and Asian.
Satyagraha
failed to subdue Hindu and Muslim nationalism as it had subdued British imperialism. Five months after the violent birth of independent India and Pakistan, the scene of Jaurès’s death was reenacted in Delhi. Like Jaurès, Gandhi was shot by a nationalist who considered him insufficiently patriotic.

With Gandhi, as with Jaurès, died the hope of a continent turning decisively away from war. Nehru, prime minister of newly independent India, had never been a wholehearted believer in nonviolence. The rulers of Pakistan believed in nonviolence even less. Within thirty years after independence, three wars showed how little Gandhi’s countrymen had learned from his example. India and Pakistan fought over the disputed province of Kashmir as France and Germany had fought over Alsace and Lorraine. Together with the regiments and warships of the colonial army and navy, the governments of India and Pakistan inherited an addiction to the old European game of power politics. Gandhi’s
satyagraha
was an effective weapon for a subject people to use against their oppressors, but his followers discarded it promptly as soon as they gained control of their own government and stood in the oppressors’ shoes.

The moral of Gandhi’s life and death is that pacifism as a political program is much more difficult to sustain than pacifism as a personal ethic. Being himself a leader of extraordinary charisma and skill, Gandhi was able to organize a whole people around a program of pacifism. He proved that a pacifist resistance movement can be sustained for thirty years and can be strong enough to defeat an empire. The subsequent history of India proved that political pacifism was not strong enough to survive the death of its leader and to withstand the temptations of power.

During the years between the two world wars, while Gandhi was successfully organizing his nonviolent resistance in India, political pacifism was also popular in Europe. European pacifists were encouraged
by Gandhi’s example and hoped to revive Jaurès’s dream of an international alliance of nonviolent resisters against militaristic national governments. The pacifist dream in Europe failed disastrously. There were three main reasons for the failure: lack of leadership, lack of a positive objective, and Hitler. The European pacifists never produced a leader comparable to Gandhi. Einstein was a pacifist, and lent his name and prestige to the pacifist cause until the rise of Hitler led him to change his mind, but he had no wish to be a political leader. Like Tolstoy, he was more of a hero to the world at large than to his own countrymen. Pacifism, even at the peak of Einstein’s popularity, was never strong in Germany. It was strongest in England, where George Lansbury, a Christian Socialist with firm pacifist convictions, was leader of the Labour Party from 1931 to 1935. Lansbury was capable of courageous action in the Gandhi style. In 1930, when he was mayor of Poplar in the East End of London, he went to prison rather than submit to government policies which he considered oppressive. He remained a hero to his constituents in East London. But he never attempted to dominate the European scene as Gandhi dominated the scene in India. Gandhi had the tremendous advantage of a positive objective, the cause of Indian independence, around which he could mobilize the enthusiasm of his followers. Lansbury and the other European pacifists had no similar objective; they supported the League of Nations as an international peacekeeping authority, but the League of Nations was an inadequate focus for a mass political movement. The league was widely perceived as nothing more than a debating society for elderly politicians. Nobody could take seriously the picture of millions of Europeans defying their governments in a gesture of loyalty to the league. Gandhi was swimming with the tide of nationalism; Lansbury and his followers were swimming against it. As a result, the foreign policy of the British Labour Party under Lansbury’s leadership was wholly negative; no rearmament, no action against Hitler, and no wholehearted commitment to pacifism.

It was Lansbury’s fate to preside over the British pacifist movement at the peak of its popularity during the same years which saw Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. A few weeks before Hitler became chancellor, the undergraduates of Oxford debated the proposition “That this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country,” and approved it by a substantial majority. This vote received widespread publicity and may in fact, as the opponents of pacifism later claimed, have encouraged Hitler to pursue his plans of European conquest more boldly. Whether or not Hitler paid attention to the Oxford students’ vote, there is no doubt that his aggressive policies were encouraged by the existence of strong pacifist sentiments in England and France. In October 1933, Hitler felt confident enough to withdraw from the international Disarmament Conference which had been meeting before he became chancellor; this action was an official notification to the world that he intended to rearm Germany. Four days later, Lansbury spoke for the Labour Party in the House of Commons:

The great nations were not about to disarm, as Lansbury well knew. His policy meant that England would simply do nothing, neither arm nor disarm. He was caught in the tragic dilemma of political pacifism. The pacifists of England and France, by announcing their unwillingness to fight, made Hitler more reckless in risking war and made the war more terrible when it came. There is no easy answer to this dilemma. A country facing an aggressive enemy must
decide either to be prepared to fight effectively or to follow the path of nonviolence to the end. In either case, the decision must be wholehearted and the consequences must be accepted. The example of England in the 1930s proves only that a halfhearted commitment to pacifism is worse than none at all. Halfhearted pacifism is in practice indistinguishable from cowardice. European pacifism became finally discredited when World War II began and halfhearted pacifists could not be distinguished from cowards and collaborators. The debacle of European pacifism has at least one clear lesson to teach us: pacifists, if they are to be effective in the modern world, must be as wholehearted and as brave as Gandhi.

In 1935 Lansbury was forced to choose between his pacifist principles and his position as leader of the Labour Party. Being an honest man, he stuck to his principles and handed over the leadership of the party to Clement Attlee, the same Attlee who became prime minister ten years later and made the decision to arm Britain with nuclear weapons. Pacifism as an effective political force in England was dead. But it was still alive in India. Young Englishmen like me, who were against the establishment and against the empire, acclaimed Gandhi as a hero. We greatly preferred the flamboyant Gandhi to the powerless Lansbury and the colorless Attlee. Our conversation was sprinkled with the rhetoric of pacifist doctrine. If only we had a leader like Gandhi, we said, we would fill the jails and bring the warmongers to their senses. We continued to talk in this style, while Hitler filled his concentration camps in Germany and silenced those who opposed his policies. Then in 1940 Hitler attacked and overran France. We were face to face, as Lansbury had been in 1933, with the classic pacifist dilemma. We still believed theoretically in the ethic of nonviolence, but we looked at what was happening in France and decided that nonviolent resistance would not be effective against Hitler. Reluctantly, we concluded that we had better fight for our King and Country after all.

Forty years later, a book,
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed
, was written by Philip Hallie, telling the story of a French village which chose the path of nonviolent resistance against Hitler.
²
It is a remarkable story. It shows that nonviolence could be effective, even against Hitler. The village of Le Chambon sur Lignon collectively sheltered and saved the lives of many hundreds of Jews through the years when the penalty for this crime was deportation or death. The villagers were led by their Protestant pastor, André Trocmé, who had been for many years a believer in nonviolence and had prepared them mentally and spiritually for this trial of strength. When the Gestapo from time to time raided the village, Trocmé’s spies usually gave him enough warning so that the refugees could be hidden in the woods. German authorities arrested and executed various people who were known to be leaders in the village, but the resistance continued unbroken. The only way the Germans could have crushed the resistance was by deporting or killing the entire population. Nearby, in the same part of France, there was a famous regiment of
SS
troops, the Tartar Legion, trained and experienced in operations of extermination and mass brutality. The Tartar Legion could easily have exterminated Le Chambon. But the village survived. Even Trocmé himself, by a series of lucky accidents, survived.