> They're fighting for their country's existence. I would use every weapon in my disposal; and I'm a pacifist who hates violence.
I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".
I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons. If you can imagine a biological, chemical, radiation, concussive, or other weapon, it's been worked on. There has been more than one project to build a "world-ending weapon" and go way beyond the MAD theory.
They're fighting for their own existence. Russia has killed, enslaved, and/or tortured most of the citizens of the regions it's already captured, and replaced them with ethnic Russians.
I think "killed, enslaved, and/or tortured most of the citizens of the regions it's already captured" is an exaggeration. That is not to deny Russian war crimes, which are clearly large-scale and horrendous. But I don't think the majority of people in those regions have been killed or enslaved.
I'm a big supporter of Ukraine and have donated to the war effort and hosted Ukrainian refugees.
Do you believe that the majority of inhabitants even of Mariupol have been killed, tortured or enslaved? If so, could you point me to a source for that? Wikipedia reports its population has dropped from about 425K to an estimated 120K, but reports an estimate that 200K people fled; they report a high-end estimate of 25K people killed during the 2022 siege itself.
>> I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".
Wait till you hear that I'm also an anti-nationalist :P
But I'm also pragmatic. Nations aren't going away and they have armies and they like to invade each other. If my country were to be invaded (not a zero probability; I'm Greek and if NATO collapses...) I would put the good of my people above my personal beliefs before you could say "peacenick". C'est la vie.
>> I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons.
I think I do but why do you say this? I didn't understand how it connects to the rest of your comment, or to mine.
But don't you think Greece, if nothing else, emphasizes that a country isn't defined by whoever happens to declare it as part of their borders, but the people within those borders? Greece persisted for millennia, even when there was no Greece. The state disappeared but the people persisted.
I'm not at all a pacifist but there is no country I would fight, let alone die, for. Because when we say that we're really speaking of fighting and dying for politicians, not a country. And there is no political group that, in my opinion, deserves anywhere near that level of loyalty.
>> But don't you think Greece, if nothing else, emphasizes that a country isn't defined by whoever happens to declare it as part of their borders, but the people within those borders? Greece persisted for millennia, even when there was no Greece. The state disappeared but the people persisted.
Yes, I have considered this argument and it rings true to me. On the other hand, it is worth considering that there are no Greeks left in the coast of Asia Minor, any more, a land that Greeks occupied since the time of Homer. The same goes for the coast of the Black Sea, occupied by the Pontic Greeks. Like the Armenians, the Capaddocian christians, and the Assyrian Christians, Greeks were ethnically cleansed or genocided, depending on your point of view [1], by the nascent Turkish state in the 1920's.
I should point out that the event that triggered the ethnic cleansing was a nationalistic, irredentist spasm that sent the Greek army invading Asia Minor to "liberate" it. I'm guessing that the Turkish would have slaughtered the Asia Minor Greeks anyway, like they did everyone else who wasn't a) muslim or b) Turkish speaking, but in the eventuality, it was the Greeks who started it.
As my footnote notes, we call the events of 1922 "The Catastrophe". The Greeks are one of three Mediterranean peoples who have a word that means "disaster", that is used for a specific disaster so that when this word is spoken everyone knows which disaster it means: the Jews have the Shoah, the Palestinians the Nakba. And just like the Jews, the Greeks lost the land our ancestors occupied for thousands of years, we lost our greatest city, Constantinople, and we lost our greatest temple, the Aghia Sophia, which was turned to a mosque.
I cannot in any good faith be a pacifist without acknowledging this bloody history that has threatened to wipe out my people, and expelled them from their land; and not just my own people. Nations are nasty things and they are not, I fear, just jurisdictions. Nations are people. People kill other people because they don't belong to the same nations; not abstract, faceless nations.
If I were to be a pacifist without recognising the fact that the very existence of my people may one day be at risk, what kind of pacifist would I be? An idiot, or a suicidal pacifist, I reckon.
So I'm a pacifist with limits. Kind of like a bounded pacifism, if you like.
But, if it came to that, I would give my life for peace as much as I would give my life for my people.
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[1] Wikipedia calls it the "Greek genocide" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide). At school we learned it was ethnic cleansing. We commonly refer to it as Η Καταστροφή. The Catastrophe.
Thanks for sharing your perspective and the events that shaped this view.
> But, if it came to that, I would give my life for peace as much as I would give my life for my people.
Staging a nonviolent protest to make the British leave or to let an authoritarian government you're refusing to go fight their war of choice, or trying to help a woman getting mugged by masked militia and getting shot as a result is "giving your life for peace".
But if you'd had the choice of leaving the place before the invadors massacred your family, or fighting back with "all the weapons at your disposal", and chose the killing, I don't see why you are so attached to this "pacifist" label.
I'd summarize your stance as "if somebody declares war on my nation, I will fight with all my strength". Am I getting it right?
This sounds more like non-aggressive nationalism to me. I'm not criticizing it, it's just the mismatch that I find surprising.
Pacifism is:
> The conviction that it is morally wrong to settle disputes (especially between countries) by war or other violent means
> The ethical avoidance of inflicting harm on others in one's daily life.
That's also, more or less, exactly what I was thinking. For instance I don't eat foie gras because I find it inhumane, but I would never call myself an animal rights activist because of that.
I think in modern times we are, for some reason, attached to labels when in reality people's positions are, if they're thinking for themselves, going to be nuanced enough that there will be no appropriate label. Not wanting to participate in the development of autonomous killing machines, let alone ones that inevitably will be abused, is a perfectly reasonable position, but does not at all make one a pacifist in and of itself.
>I think I do but why do you say this? I didn't understand how it connects to the rest of your comment, or to mine.
not the parent, but i have a guess.
they mention the variety of weapons because some weapons are abhorrent. designed to be maximally painful, for the maximum amount of time, purely to bring about maximum suffering.
"every weapon at your disposal" includes those weapons. and that is really difficult to square with "im a pacifist", even when considering conditional pacifism.
Using every weapon at your disposal would entail, at the extreme end, unleashing weapons which could viably kill every person on this planet - to defend a state. It's not exactly a typical foundation for pacifism.
Well, if it helps, I'm a Computer Scientist so I can't think of how to destroy the entire world with "every weapon at my disposal". I reckon at most I could make a more lethal drone swarm.
EDIT: Oh, I should clarify, that's where all this stuff about pacifism comes from. I did some research on autonomous AI for robotics during a post-doc and that made me think more carefully about somewhat extreme situations that would hopefully never arise, and how I would react to them. I mean I was already thinking that way but the hands-on experience and real, if distant, possibility of my work being used in ways I would never want it to be, helped solidify those earlier thoughts into a more coherent form.
I'm saying because given my username you might legitimately wonder whether I would actually ever be in the position of taking up arms, like actual weapons, to fight for my country. Probably not. But programming or piloting drones is absolutely not out of the question, as a thing I'm qualified to do. So I had to think about whether I'd do it, and under what circumstances.
I'm also a signatory of the Lethal Autonomous Weapons Pledge which I signed during my PhD:
I live in a country that has been under missile strikes recently. This country has the ability to strike back at the aggressor and make their land unliveable.
Even if there was the certainty of non-retaliation for such a disproportional defense, I would not consider using these weapons acceptable while calling yourself "a pacifist."
I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when oppressing conquered peoples if you think resisting an invasion with every means available is the incorrect choice because it kills people.
You're losing your bet. Also, you might be losing the argument by taking this conversation past the Godwin point.
But, to answer your specific question, no, I do not think it is "wrong" (which is a moral judgment) to fight against people who want to kill others.
This is a complex argument because:
1. I, due to my ancestry, would have been in the outgroup that pretty much any genocidal maniac would be targeting (including that one)
2. I would have been doing my best, back when political means were still on the table, to fight against the idea that letting the bully have his way was the most expedient manner. The whole decade would have gone quite differently if Germany had not been allowed to freely build up the means to invade neighbors willy-nilly.
3. If I had lived in Germany, eastern France, etc. would have been gone with my family way before the onslaught started. If we're letting this looming thing happen, you can have the land and my shopfront. I'm resourceful enough to set up shop elsewhere.
4. Failing (2) and (3), I'd be fighting. But thinking that fighting is the first resort is what allows you to be manipulated by a handful of rich old men who'll send you to the trenches to die.
I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".
I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons. If you can imagine a biological, chemical, radiation, concussive, or other weapon, it's been worked on. There has been more than one project to build a "world-ending weapon" and go way beyond the MAD theory.